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In April, the Ecuadorian Amazon region was hit by one of the worst oil spills it had experienced in over a decade. As 15,800 barrels of crude oil spilled out from ruptured pipelines, over 120,000 Ecuadorians found their rivers running thick with oil and their only source of food and water polluted – all on top of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic spreading into their ancestral territories.
Stand.earth and Amazon Watch’s new report reveals that in the last decade, a range of banks have provided $10 billion USD in trade financing for over 155 million barrels of oil from the Ecuadorian region of the Amazon Sacred Headwaters to refineries in the U.S. The top six banks, ING, Credit Suisse, Natixis, BNP Paribas, UBS, and Rabobank alone account for 85 percent of all bank financed trade.
Despite having environmental and human rights policy commitments, major European banks have financed the trade of crude oil in the region, making them complicit in the rights violations and health impacts on Indigenous communities. These European banks must publicly commit to immediately stop all financing of any oil-related activities, including trade, in the Amazon.
Will you urge these banks to stop financing the trade of Amazon crude and remind them to respect Ecuadorian Indigenous communities' call to stop the extraction of oil in the Amazon Sacred Headwaters?
Stand.earth and Amazon Watch are members of the international Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative, working alongside allied organizations and Indigenous federations in Ecuador and Peru to draw global attention and support to halt industrial extractivism and protect the Amazon Sacred Headwaters region.
