2023
French and European’s bank fund deforestation in Amazone
Entry type: Single project
Country/area: France
Publishing organisation: Disclose
Organisation size: Small
Publication date: 2022-11-28
Language: French
Authors: Remi Labed
Geoffrey Livolsi
Biography:
Rémi Labed is a French investigative journalist and documentary film maker. He has worked for several TV shows such as Cash Investigation (France 2), Spécial Investigation (Canal+) and Envoyé Spécial (France 2). Passionate about computers, Rémi has specialized in security and data journalism.
Geoffrey Livolsi is a journalist and cofounder of Disclose. He has worked for several media before created the not for profit newsroom Disclose in december 2018 with Mathias Destal. Since two years he work on project link to deforestation in Amazon.
Project description:
Disclose and Repórter Brasil – in partnership with NGO’s Sherpa, Harvest and the Center Climate Crime Analysis are anlysed 36 000 financial transactions between french bank and europeans financial institution with agribusiness companies linked to deforestation in Brazil.
Impact reached:
In France, the investigation showed that several banks had still not applied the new law on vigilance, which obliges companies to verify that the businesses they finance are not linked to environmental or human rights abuses. Several banks have announced new rules on controls. NGOs have called for tighter controls on financial institutions.
Techniques/technologies used:
Disclose has also cleaned and classified the data of financial transactions of banks from 17 European countries with agribusiness companies in Brazil, in order to create an online platform with streamlit accessible to European media so that they can use it to write their own investigations. Die Welt, InfoLibre and L’Espresso wrote stories based on this data. We decide to analyse data only on oil, palm oil and soy companies, because these are the 3 main productions responsible for deforestation. For this we have use we created an algorithm and coded an online platform. allowing for each country to classify the banks by type and amount of investment, by type of agricultural production supported, by the evolution of investment over the last ten years, and by the most financed companies for each bank. We have also done this for the European Union as a whole.
Context about the project:
No issue
What can other journalists learn from this project?
Beginners who want to beneficiate from the two platforms we have already built with “streamlit” to expose which European bank is funding Amazon deforestation. Journalist from 17 european country can use the plateform of Disclose to start investigation
Project links:
https://r3mlab-deforestationeu-app-iizce5.streamlitapp.com/
