A new Forests and Finance Coalition report finds top financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and BlackRock, support mining companies linked to deforestation, land-grabs, contamination and Indigenous rights violations. According to the report, from 2016-24, major banks provided $493 billion in loans and underwriting to mining companies, including Glencore, Rio Tinto and Vale. As of June 2025, investors held $289 billion in bonds and shares of 111 transition mineral companies. The report focuses on financing for companies mining critical minerals used in the global energy transition, including lithium, nickel, graphite and cobalt. Nearly 70% of these transition mineral mines overlap with Indigenous lands and roughly an equal amount is in regions of high biodiversity. Such minerals are widely used in clean energy technologies, such as solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles (EVs). But the way mining companies extract and process them is driving widespread environmental destruction and human rights abuses, the report said. “Our findings shed light on the central role that financial institutions play in enabling this new wave of destruction as companies rush to expand mining operations as rapidly as possible,” Steph Dowlen, forests and finance campaigner for the Rainforest Action Network, told Mongabay by email. “While this extraction for raw minerals falls under a ‘green’, ‘clean’ or ‘renewable’ banner, it’s still extraction and the mining sector remains high-risk, dominated by companies with egregious track records on rights, the environment and corporate accountability.” The report assessed environmental, social and governance policy scores of 30…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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