November 10, 2021
Glasgow, Scotland - Indigenous land defenders gathered outside the JP Morgan Chase offices in Glasgow’s financial district today to demand the bank stop financing fossil fuel extraction. 

Since the signing of the Paris Accords in 2015, the world’s largest 60 banks have provided $3.8 trillion globally for fossil fuel extraction and related infrastructure, like pipelines. Of these financers, JP Morgan Chase is the worst with $316 billion in fossil fuel funding over the same time period.

Despite these commitments, Chase’s investments include some of the most destructive and polluting types of extraction such as tar sands, Arctic oil and gas, Amazon oil and gas, fracking, and coal mining. Much of the infrastructure funded by the bank, like Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline and the Coastal Gaslink pipeline, is having direct impacts on the land and lives of Indigenous nations, and is being actively resisted by Indigenous peoples and impacted communities.

“We want to tell the world that the jungle, our home, is bleeding from the presence of extractive mining and oil companies that are destroying the only forests we have left.” emphasizes Nemo Andy Guíquita, Director of Women and Health for the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon (CONFENIAE).  “Today, as we are here, thousands of hectares are being cut down and our culture and identity is in danger. We want the banks and governments to understand once and for all the immense damage that they continue to cause to our peoples when they finance the trade of Amazon crude; today they have the opportunity to show the world that they are on the side of humanity’s survival, and finally stop the devastation of the planet.” 

JPMorgan Chase is the largest banker for the fossil fuel industry worldwide, and the largest investor in oil and gas companies currently operating in the Amazon rainforest. It holds millions of dollars in bonds issued to PetroAmazonas, the oil exploration unit of Ecuador’s national oil company, PetroEcuador. PetroAmazonas is leading oil expansion in Yasuní National Park, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, where the process of building roads to access new oil drilling sites often triggers deforestation and brings drilling to the doorstep of Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation. The company is responsible for thousands of oil spills over the last decade. JP Morgan Chase is dragging its heels on implementing sound Environmental Social Risk (ESR) policies, including in the Amazon. It continues to fund Brazil’s national oil company, Petrobras, which is ranked one of the largest fossil fuel expansion companies globally.