Reporting by Sasha Chavkin. Data analysis by Mago Torres, Rachel Auslander and Fernanda Aguirre of The Examination. Alex Rozier of Mississippi Today and Kuek Ser Kuang Keng of the Pulitzer Center also contributed.
As the world gets hotter, banks are offering corporations another form of “green” finance, pouring $1.5 trillion into sustainability-linked loans from 2018 to 2023. But unlike conventional green loans, SLLs don’t require companies to spend the money to protect the environment.
An investigation by The Examination, Toronto Star and Mississippi Today has found that more than $286 billion in these SLLs went to hundreds of companies in the following sectors with heavy carbon footprints: food and agriculture, fossil fuels, mining, timber, and corporations in the Forest 500, an index of companies linked to significant deforestation.
That’s nearly 1 in 5 dollars out of all SLLs, the team’s analysis of data from the London Stock Exchange Group from those years showed.
In addition to the loans identified in this analysis, The Examination’s story included other SLLs linked to polluting industries by reviewing more recent company press releases and business records outside the timeframe of the dataset. The findings do not suggest that each individual company in the dataset contributes to climate change, but they all lie within an industry that does.
Search below to explore companies and banks that benefited from sustainability-linked loans.
Methodology
This investigation relied on an analysis of a global dataset on sustainability-linked loans (SLLs) from the London Stock Exchange Group. The Examination worked in partnership with the investigative consultant agency DataDesk to obtain the dataset, which covered loan payments that were flagged as SLLs between the years 2018 and 2023. The LSEG dataset included values for all loans in USD, which The Examination used for its analysis, as well as for the original currency of the loan.
This is a unique and independent analysis centered on SLLs obtained by companies within industries that are major drivers of climate change. While prior research has investigated how sustainable debt supports fossil fuels, this analysis also brings in several other key industries that are directly contributing to global warming, primarily through deforestation. The additional industries in this analysis include: food and agriculture, the second largest contributor to global warming behind fossil fuels, as well as mining and timber. The analysis also included companies in the Forest 500, an index of companies with the greatest exposure to tropical deforestation developed by the nonprofit transparency group Global Canopy. Some companies were included in more than one of these categories, but duplicates were removed in calculating the total value of SLLs obtained by these industries collectively. The findings do not suggest that each individual company contributes to climate change, but they all lie within an industry that does.
To classify companies within these industry groups, we identified subcategories using the “Major Industry Group Description” for each company contained in the LSEG data. We matched these subcategories with a taxonomy from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (For example, The Examination identified “Food and Agriculture” as a broader industry group, and then the subcategory “Meat Packing Plants” in LSEG data, as well as the corresponding OSHA definition.) We included subcategories whose activities directly contribute to the main climate consequences of these broader industries, as well as subcategories that are direct buyers of climate-risk products. Industry subcategories with indirect impact on the climate were excluded. (For example, dairy farms and beef cattle feedlot companies were included, but refrigerator manufacturers that help maintain these products were not.)