In Memory of Paul Maxey Davies
Sources: “Consensus on consensus,” U.S. National Climate Assessment and NOAA
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It’s an area 65 times the size of Paris that disappears each year. More than half of the Cerrado savanna in Brazil, one of the world’s most precious ecosystems, has been torn apart to make way for continuously expanding soy farms.
In spite of its great speeches on climate, BNP remains one of the world’s largest funders of deforestation.
A few days ago, during a “zero-carbon” event in Paris, BNP boasted about implementing binding policies to stop deforestation caused by the soy industry. But it was all lip service.
It is time to bring BNP’s hypocrisy to light through mass mobilization. Facing a major PR crisis, BNP will have no other choice but to put an end to its shameful complicity to save the face. No more fake-green promises we want action, now:
Recently published investigative reports* exposed BNP Paribas’s bankrolling of soy traders to the tune of billions over the past four years.
These investments are costly to the Indigenous populations who pay the price with their own lives. Big soy companies are destroying everything at a breakneck pace: their way of life, their rivers and their forests as well as all the biodiversity they harbor.
But the disappearance of the Cerrado, of its unique biodiversity and Indigenous populations is avoidable! Bankers, insurers and investors can transform the soy industry to achieve “zero-deforestation”.
Even when faced with the hard cold facts, BNP is still refusing to adopt binding measures that would forbid the importation of soy grown from deforestation. The bank, which built so much of its brand on its “climate friendly” image, will have to make a change if you force it to.
Two months ago, during Climate Finance Day, your efforts forced top financial players to acknowledge their responsibility in deforestation caused by soy. That’s why, today, a massive mobilization is the only way to push them into action, starting with the worst of them: BNP Paribas.
When it comes to the fight against deforestation, you have already pushed giants like PepsiCo and McDonald’s to change their practices. Without your help, BNP will go unchecked, ignoring the alarm raised by the Indigenous communities, NGOs and other environmentalists, fighting to save our planet and its people.
Just this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere reached a record 419 parts per million. This alarming new milestone has alerted us to a reality of living in a world with an atmosphere not seen in four million years.
Back then, sea levels were 78 feet higher and the planet was 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average. The Earth played host to large mastodons and our early human ancestors would not emerge for another two million years in much cooler temperatures. For nearly all of our existence, humankind has not lived with anywhere near the levels of CO2 we’re encountering today. We are a living experiment and this is uncharted territory. What we do know is that the effects of climate change are already being felt, from intense hurricanes, flooding and heatwaves to unstoppable wildfires consuming all in their path.
Now more than ever, the efforts for nations to cut carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases must be intensified. This is also why climate literacy is so important.
The decades-long failure to provide quality and meaningful climate and environmental education and civic skills to students worldwide has undermined the effort to solve the climate crises and other critical environmental issues while hampering efforts to build a global green economy and to create the jobs of the future. It has also impeded efforts to teach citizens the civic skills that they need to fully participate in their national, state and local government decision-making process, undermining the rights of citizens to take action to protect themselves, their children and the health of the planet.
Climate education, with an emphasis on equity and inclusion at every level, will foster a new generation ready to tackle the existential climate crisis we face today. Combined with urgent policy shifts, climate and environmental literacy will create jobs, build a green consumer market and allow citizens to engage with their governments in a meaningful way to solve climate change.
At COP26, governments will meet to raise ambition under the UN’s Paris Climate Change Agreement. That stepped-up action must include climate and environmental literacy.
EARTHDAY.ORG believes every school in the world must have compulsory, assessed climate and environmental education with a strong civic engagement component.
In unity, Kathleen Rogers
President
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