A little more than three months after having given notice to BNP Paribas to cease all financial support for new fossil energy projects, the associations Notre affaires à tous, Oxfam and Les Amis de la Terre took the bank to court on Thursday 23 FEBRUARY. After the condemnation of the State for “climate inaction” as part of the “deal of the century”, after TotalEnergies was taken to court for its mega oil project in Uganda and Tanzania, the NGOs now intend to open the first “trial of a funder of climate chaos”.
It will be up to the Paris court to investigate it, according to a schedule that remains to be defined. The NGOs are already talking about the prospect of a “historic trial”. “This climate dispute against a commercial bank is undoubtedly the first of a long series, all over the world”thinks Justine Ripoll, of Our business to all.
In the summons, that The world was able to consult, the associations invoke the law on the duty of vigilance to base their action. Adopted in 2017 after the Rana Plaza tragedy (more than a thousand workers from multinational textile companies died in the collapse of a building in Bangladesh in 2013), it obliges large French companies to identify the risks and prevent serious harm to the environment and to human rights that may result from their activities. In this case, the NGOs criticize BNP Paribas for not applying it in climate matters, by continuing to finance companies that develop new oil and gas projects.
“A huge responsibility”
“The financial sector has a huge responsibility in our collective ability to respect or not the Paris agreement”, which sets the goal of keeping warming below 1.5°C, says Justine Ripoll. Why target BNP Parisbas? Because the French bank is “the leading European financier of the expansion of fossil fuels”, justifies Lorette Philippot, specialist in climate and financial issues at Friends of the Earth. Between 2016 (after the conclusion of the Paris agreement) and 2021, it granted 55 billion dollars (51.77 billion euros) in financing, in the form of loans or the issuance of shares or bonds , oil and gas majors like TotalEnergies, BP or Shell. According to data compiled in the 2022 edition of the Banking on Climate Chaos, a reference report piloted by a dozen NGOs, including Reclaim Finance, these companies are still developing oil and gas projects. More than the British HSBC and Barclays (54 billion dollars each) which complete the podium, and far more than the French Societe Generale and Crédit Agricole, 16e et 17e of this ranking, with respectively 33 billion and 32 billion dollars.
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