Welcome to the Urgewald media center

Since the Paris Agreement in 2016, the world’s 60 largest private banks financed fossil fuels with USD $6.9 trillion. Nearly half – $3.3 trillion – went towards fossil fuel expansion. In 2023, banks financed $705 billion in fossil fuel financing with $347 billion going to fossil fuel expansion alone.

2021 was the year in which the International Energy Agency issued its Net Zero by 2050 scenario, underlining the need for a rapid transition out of coal. It was the year in which COP26 in Glasgow agreed to accelerate the phase-down of coal and in which commercial banks launched the Net Zero Banking Alliance. “2021 should have been a turning point. Yet our data shows that banks are still injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into the industry, which is our climate’s worst enemy,” says Katrin Ganswindt, head of financial research at Urgewald. 

Today the World Bank released a scandalous internal investigation of child sexual abuse allegations at private schools funded by its private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Although World Bank President Ajay Banga has expressed contrition, the IFC’s official management response fails to offer meaningful remedy to the survivors of abuse that it turned a blind eye to for almost a decade.  

Accountability Counsel, Inclusive Development International,  Gender Action and Urgewald urge Executive Directors to reject the IFC's response and demand justice for child sexual abuse victims.

New Urgewald research shows the large amounts of liquefied natural gas (LNG) that EU member states such as Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Spain keep receiving from Russia, two years after its war of aggression against Ukraine began. 

The environmental and human rights organization Urgewald (Germany), the Port Arthur Community Action Network (USA), and the Center for Energy, Ecology, and Development – CEED (Philippines) address the massive global build-out of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and amplify the voices of frontline communities in North America and Southeast Asia.