I’ve stepped outside the glass-walled conference room at the Vancouver Convention Centre, seeking a moment of quiet after a morning of climate finance presentations. Through the windows, I can see the snow-dusted North Shore mountains rising beyond the harbor, a reminder of the natural systems at stake in the decisions being made inside.
The latest Banking on Climate Chaos report sits open on my tablet, its findings as stark as the contrast between the corporate conference space and the wilderness beyond. For five years I’ve covered the climate finance beat, watching the dance between commitment and action, and today’s revelations feel particularly significant for communities across British Columbia and beyond.
Global banks poured a staggering $791 billion into fossil fuel expansion in 2024 alone, according to the report released yesterday by the Rainforest Action Network and partner organizations. This 16% increase from 2023 levels comes despite many of these same institutions making high-profile climate pledges under the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) framework.
“We’re seeing a concerning pattern of public commitment followed by private contradiction,” explains Bronwen Tucker, who tracks global financial flows at Oil Change International. I spoke with Tucker last week as she prepared for the report’s release. “The numbers tell a clear story: major banks are talking transition while funding expansion.”
The timing couldn’t be more revealing. Just months after JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley quietly withdrew from the UN-backed NZBA, their fossil financing reached five-year highs. JPMorgan Chase alone provided $42 billion for oil and gas expansion projects in 2024, maintaining its position as the world’s largest fossil fuel financier since the Paris Agreement.
For Wetʼsuwetʼen land defender Molly Wickham, whom I interviewed during protests against the Coastal GasLink pipeline last year, these financial decisions have immediate consequences.
“When we see these huge sums flowing into fossil development, we’re not looking at abstract numbers,” Wickham told me. “We’re seeing direct threats to our water, our salmon, our ceremonies, our children’s future. The banks financing these projects never have to face the communities whose lives are disrupted.”
The disconnect between climate rhetoric and financial reality has grown more pronounced in recent years. RBC, Canada’s largest bank and a significant funder of the oil sands, increased its fossil financing by 11% while maintaining its NZBA membership – a position that Indigenous climate advocates have called deeply hypocritical.
The Banking on Climate Chaos report uses methodology developed by the Transition Pathway Initiative to assess alignment with the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero by 2050 roadmap. By this measure, none of the 60 major banks analyzed are on track with climate targets that would limit warming to 1.5°C.
Yet amidst these troubling trends, some institutions are beginning to implement more substantive policies. La Banque Postale in France and Nordea in Scandinavia have adopted comprehensive exclusion policies for companies expanding fossil fuel production. The European Investment Bank has ended all financing for unabated fossil fuel projects.
“The problem isn’t technical – we know what policies work,” explains Alison Kirsch at Rainforest Action Network, who has co-authored the report since its inception. “The obstacle is political will and the extraordinary influence of the fossil fuel industry within financial institutions.”
For communities on the frontlines of both climate impacts and extraction, the stakes couldn’t be higher. In northern British Columbia, where atmospheric rivers and unprecedented wildfires have devastated communities in recent years, the continued expansion of fossil infrastructure feels increasingly disconnected from lived reality.
“We’re experiencing climate impacts today that weren’t supposed to arrive for decades,” notes Jessie Housty, a Heiltsuk community leader I spoke with after last summer’s record-breaking heat dome. “When we see banks continuing to finance the very industries driving these changes, it feels like our experiences don’t matter.”
The banking sector’s climate contradictions have attracted growing regulatory scrutiny. The European Central Bank implemented climate stress tests for banks in 2022, while the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has issued guidance on climate-related financial risk management. In Canada, where fossil fuel financing remains particularly concentrated, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions has developed similar guidelines, though critics argue they lack enforcement mechanisms.
According to Ben Cushing at the Sierra Club’s Fossil-Free Finance campaign, voluntary frameworks have proven insufficient. “The Net-Zero Banking Alliance was always based on the premise that banks would gradually align their portfolios with climate targets,” Cushing explained during a virtual press conference yesterday. “What we’re seeing instead is that when the commitments became inconvenient, major banks simply walked away.”
The exodus from climate alliances points to deeper questions about financial regulation in an era of climate crisis. While banks cite competitive disadvantages and legal concerns as reasons for withdrawing from frameworks like NZBA, climate economists point to the much larger risks of continued fossil expansion.
A recent analysis from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis estimates that major banks face potential stranded asset exposure of over $97 billion from fossil fuel investments incompatible with climate targets. For pension holders, mortgage owners, and ordinary savers, these financial risks extend far beyond the balance sheets of individual institutions.
For Candice Pedersen, who serves as financial officer for the Squamish Nation and whom I met at an Indigenous finance summit last month, there’s a deeper disconnect at play.
“Our people have always understood that you can’t separate economic decisions from their impacts on the land and water,” Pedersen said. “Modern banking tries to create this artificial separation between finance and consequences. But that separation isn’t real – the consequences always come home.”
As I gather my notes and prepare to return to the afternoon sessions, I’m struck by how clinical these discussions of billions in financing can feel compared to the tangible impacts I’ve witnessed in communities across the province. The report’s findings may be expressed in dollars and cents, but their true measurement will be in rising seas, burning forests, and communities fighting to maintain their ways of life in a rapidly changing world.
