The continued financing of oil and gas extraction in the Amazon comes amid a wider rollback of banks’ sustainability pledges and an increase in fossil fuel financing globally.
The largest source of energy in Peru comes from natural gas produced in Cusco. Image by Agencia Andina.
Deep in the Peruvian Amazon, a sprawling industrial facility has been carved out of the rainforest. This is the Camisea Gas Complex, a natural gas mega-field operated by a consortium of oil companies led by Argentina’s Pluspetrol.
The complex now supplies 70% of Peru’s liquefied petroleum gas, primarily used for cooking. But the project has left behind a trail of socioenvironmental rights violations, from threats to the survival of isolated Indigenous people to failure to provide energy access to the communities closest to the complex — and on the frontlines of the multiple gas leaks that have contaminated the forest in the 20 years since production began.
In September, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, deemed Pluspetrol responsible for environmental damage and Indigenous rights violations in the Peruvian Amazon.
A plethora of banks help fund the Camisea Gas Complex. According to nonprofit Stand.earth, Pluspetrol’s local subsidiary and fellow consortium members Repsol and Hunt Oil Peru have received $3.1 billion in financing since 2016. At least 16 banks — including Citibank, JPMorganChase, Itaú Unibanco and HSBC — have provided funding in the last year.
These numbers are part of a new report, “Banks vs. The Amazon,” which uncovers how global financial institutions continue to direct resources toward oil and gas extraction in Amazonia, contributing to the destruction of the rainforest and the rise of carbon emissions that contribute to higher global temperatures — despite some banks having adopted policies to end this.
Between January 2024 and June 2025, direct financing for the extraction of oil and gas in the Amazon added up to $2 billion. More than 80% of this went to just six companies: Pluspetrol Camisea and Hunt Oil Peru as well as Canadian firm Gran Tierra, Brazilian companies Petrobras and Eneva and global oil trader Gunvor, based in Cyprus.
“Although we know the Amazon has escalating threats, and people seem to care about that and governments want to protect it, the expansion of the oil and gas industry is not actually stopping,” Martyna Dominiak, lead author of the report, told Mongabay over videocall.
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Source: Stand.earth
Stand.earth’s Amazon Banks Database lists more than 330 banks that have issued loans or bonds over the past decade to companies involved in fossil fuel extraction in the Amazon Rainforest, using the Amazon Network of Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information definition of the region.
Just 10 banks account for nearly 75% of the $15 billion directly funneled to these activities between January 2016 and June 2025. Some institutions, like Spanish bank Santander, have reduced such financing in the last year, but others, such as Canada’s Scotiabank, have increased it.
No bank has ended this type of financing, which shows that even institutions with sustainability or divestment policies are not following them, said Devyani Singh, investigative researcher on energy and climate policy at Stand.earth and lead researcher on the report.
“It could be because some of them don’t care or because they weren’t able to actually track all the companies — a lot of oil and gas extraction is done through subsidiaries, and you don’t know which parent company you’re financing,” she told Mongabay.
Laggards and a frontrunner
Stand.earth’s report ranks 18 banks based on their policies regarding the Amazon, human rights, and oil and gas, as well as their level of global fossil fuel financing and Amazon direct financing.
The banks included the top 10 funders of Amazon fossil fuel extraction in the last decade, as well as banks that have taken steps to remove these activities from their portfolio.
The “laggards” in cleaning up their portfolios include U.S. bank JPMorganChase, Canada’s Scotiabank, and Brazil’s Itaú Unibanco. JP MorganChase is the biggest overall financier since 2016, but in 2024 Itaú provided more financing than any other bank, at $378 million. This went primarily to Eneva, Brazil’s leading producer of onshore natural gas with operations in the Parnaíba and Amazon basins.
France’s BNP Paribas is the only “frontrunner,” followed by a handful of European banks, including U.K.’s HSBC and Dutch bank ING as “moderate achievers.”
According to Dominiak, there’s a regional trend: European banks tend to “have better policies and be scaling down financing,” while North American banks are more likely to be laggards, along with Latin American banks, which very often have little or no policy regarding issues like fossil fuels and human rights, she said.
The type of policy matters too. Exclusion policies are most effective when they target an entire company rather than just certain projects. There are also loopholes around different types of financing, with certain transactions harder to scrutinize or not excluded.
“HSBC is the clearest example that corporate-level policy can work,” Dominiak said.
For years, the British bank was among the biggest financiers of oil and gas production in the Amazon. As part of a wider oil and gas policy adopted in late 2022, HSBC excluded financing not only for new and existing oil and gas projects in the Amazon, but also for clients with “substantial” operations there. This led to a significant decline in financing, with HSBC dropping to 17th place in 2024-25, compared with fifth over the last 10 years.
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Source: Stand.earth
Yet HSBC’s policies also illustrate remaining loopholes, as the bank has continued both direct and indirect financing to companies with fossil fuel operations in the Amazon since 2022, notably Repsol and Petrobras, the Stand.earth scorecard shows.
Brazil’s state-controlled Petrobras has just one productive block in the Amazon, accounting for a fraction of its total output. But “there is no way banks financing Petrobras can know the money isn’t going to the Amazon. You have to assume, if you’re giving billions, that some percentage will eventually end up in that Amazon block,” Dominiak said.
An important part of Petrobras’ strategy for the future involves expanding operations to offshore areas near the mouth of the Amazon, where the company just received authorization for exploratory drilling despite strong opposition from local communities and environmentalists. Banks like HSBC and BNP Paribas do not include the Mouth of the Amazon sedimentary basin as part of the Amazon in their exclusion policies.
Campaigners would also like to see banks look beyond just oil and gas companies and expand these policies to other firms involved in the business, such as traders or companies behind infrastructure.
“If you look at which financial institutions have some kind of exclusion criteria on oil and gas, there’s very little exclusion on oil and gas infrastructure projects,” said Heffa Schuecking, director at Urgewald, an NGO that recently published a report on the money trail behind fossil fuel expansion in Latin America.
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Source: Stand.earth
It is often financing for big infrastructure projects that creates a debt cycle, locking in the need for fossil fuel production for decades, she told Mongabay over a videocall.
HSBC, JP Morgan, Citi and Santander declined to comment on Stand.earth’s report. BNP and Scotiabank did not reply to a request for comment. In an email response, Itaú outlined to Mongabay its commitments to decarbonization and zero-deforestation in the Amazon. ING said, “We do not provide dedicated finance to the exploration and production of oil & gas in the Amazon in Ecuador and Peru and do not finance the trading of oil from the region.”
Global rollback
While some Amazon financing is being scaled down, money continues to flow against a backdrop of expanding oil and gas projects in the Amazon region and increases to fossil fuel funding globally.
Earlier in October, a group of banks created in 2021 to align their activities with net-zero emissions by 2050, known as the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, collapsed. Although the alliance drew criticism — “they didn’t get anything done,” said Schuecking, who argues the alliance dragged members down to the lowest common denominator — its dismantling signals a broader shift away from environment, social and governance commitments amid pressure to do so from President Donald Trump’s administration in the US.
“Globally speaking, banks are currently backtracking massively on their climate commitments,” said Louise Wagner, banks campaigner at Reclaim Finance, an NGO campaigning to make finance work for the climate.
Santander, for example, may have decreased Amazon funding, with $37 million in direct financing in 2024-25, but it was the top financier of oil and gas expansion in Latin America and the Caribbean between 2022-24 and one of the top three European banks for fossil financing globally in 2024.
And in July, Santander updated its environmental and social risk management policy, easing previous restrictions, already considered weak, on oil and gas.
“Even though it’s great to see that there’s some kind of decline [in Amazon financing], it’s really not mirroring an overall trend in the company,” Wagner said.
She sees that banks are prioritizing short-term gain to the detriment of the climate, but also of the sustainability of their own businesses.
“Even climate scientists underestimated how quickly climate change would accelerate,” Schuecking said. “It’s very simple: As long as banks and investors continue supporting the fossil fuel industry, temperatures will continue to rise.”
Author: Constance Malleret
This article was originally published on Mongabay under the Creative Commons BY NC ND licence. Read the original article.
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