From COP16: Global NGOs File Formal Complaint to UNEP over its role in the TNFD 

Cali, Colombia – Today, a global group of NGOs and rights holders, including Rainforest Action Network, Third World Network, the Forest & Finance coalition, Indigenous Environmental Network, WECAN, Bank Track, Global Forest Coalition, Friends of the Earth International and other NGOs have filed a complaint with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) over its support of the controversial Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). The complaint follows years of warnings about the TNFD. It has been described as a ‘new frontier for corporate greenwashing’ and as undermining the real solutions to the nature crisis. 

The complaint alleges that UNEP breached its own policies on environmental defenders, gender and access to information. UNEP is a co-founder and ongoing promoter of the TNFD. The TNFD is a voluntary initiative on business self-reporting on biodiversity. Its decision-making body is a task force composed entirely of corporations. This includes many with extensive links to environmental and human rights abuses. It includes no government officials, scientists, victims of corporate harms, environmental defenders, Indigenous Peoples nor even small business. 

The TNFD’s baseline only recommends that companies report on impacts from biodiversity loss to their own profits. Crucially, the TNFD’s core approach does not even call for companies to disclose the impact of their operations on nature.

Many longtime observers of the CBD process are raising concerns at COP16 about the ‘corporate capture’ of the negotiated text resulting from inappropriate levels of influence by corporations. In Cali this week, the TNFD will feature events with some of the world’s most notorious corporations destroying nature including the mining company Anglo American. The TNFD will also feature Vale, one of the largest mining companies, as a speaker during the October 25th launch of its new adoptee companies. Bayer will speak at another TNFD event. The complaint notes that Bayer and Anglo American are both facing OECD complaints and that since 2019 Bayer has been forced to pay out $1.5 billion in environmental penalties.

The complaint coincides with a new report by Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands) on the failure of financial sector voluntary initiatives. The Milieudefensie report examines why voluntary initiatives like the TNFD are false solutions. Fundamentally, disclosures of nature-related financial risk do not lead to a reallocation of capital and distract from more democratic and effective forms of financial regulation. Belief in the false promise of disclosure reflects an overly optimistic and outdated understanding of the financial system that has been discredited since the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

Last week the Forests & Finance coalition published the annual Banking on Biodiveristy Collapse report. It shows that over US$395 billion has been directed to 300 companies in tropical forest-risk sectors since the Paris Agreement, with US$77 billion flowing in just the last year and a half (January 2023 – June 2024). The report finds that while voluntary initiatives claim to promote sustainable practices, more than half of the top 30 banks financing sectors linked to deforestation are members of such groups.

Quotes: 

Shona Hawkes, Rainforest Action Network, member of Forests & Finance coalition 

“Our complaint to UNEP comes after years of raising concerns about the TNFD. The UN system is often a key ally for environmental defenders and other fights against corporate harms. We don’t understand how UNEP has strayed so far from its core mission by co-founding an initiative that amplifies the views of powerful corporations, completely sidelining Indigenous Peoples, women and local communities. The TNFD is promoting itself as a solution during COP16 when in fact it is an initiative written by corporations for corporations. It is a dangerous distraction. Nothing in the TNFD challenges the right of corporations to profit from biodiversity harms or human rights abuses. Until there are meaningful legal and financial consequences for corporate wrongdoing, very little will change.” 

Tarcisio Feitosa da Silva, Goldman Environmental Prize winner

The TNFD as a structure is incapable of fulfilling the calls of environmental defenders. Taskforce members such as Bunge and Suzano are persistently linked to land conflicts in Brazil, and Suzano’s eucalytpus plantations have created vast biodiversity deserts. UN agencies and the international community should be supporting environmental defenders to lead solutions to the biodiversity crisis. TNFD is a smokescreen distracting from calls for justice and it does nothing to advance the demands of impacted communities.”

Souparna Lahiri, Climate Campaigner and Advisor, Global Forest Coalition 

“The commodification of nature is a root cause of biodiversity loss, which is why we are fighting for non-market solutions to this crisis. By co-founding and continuing to support the TNFD, UNEP is empowering global corporations to further the commodification of nature which undermines the true solutions put forward by Indigenous Peoples, women and local communities.”

Izabely Miranda, Executive Secretariat of the Movement for Popular Sovereignty in Mining

“The mining giant Vale has devastated lives, created polluted wastelands and caused hundreds of deaths. Communities have been fighting for justice for years. A TNFD report does nothing for these communities. It provides a veneer of respectability when it’s clear no respectable person should have anything to do with this company.” 

Danielle van Oijen, Programme Coordinator Forests, Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands)

“The TNFD is the creation of some of the world’s largest corporate deforesters and its opaque consultation processes are inaccessible to grassroots groups, rights holders, and civil society participation. It is therefore not surprising that it is not in line with Global Biodiversity Framework targets and has critical gaps.” 

Ola Janus, Campaign Lead, Banks and Nature, Banktrack 

“A simple Google search can tell you more about the environmental destruction and human rights abuses linked to companies like Rabobank, UBS, Suzano, Vale or Bunge than their TNFD reports ever will. Civil society and affected communities are burdened with uncovering corporate harms on their own – a difficult and costly process that ironically calls into question the role and very purpose of a so-called ‘disclosure framework’.”

Jeff Conant, Director International Forests Program, Friends of the Earth U.S. 

“The TNFD asks companies to disclose how ‘nature loss’ impacts their profits, but protects them from disclosing the devastating impacts their operations have on ecosystems and rights holders. So it’s clear why massive financial interests like BlackRock, BNP Paribas and Bank of America are so supportive of the TNFD: it will shield them from accountability and enable their continued plunder of the earth’s last vital treasures, while making them look clean, green and responsible. It’s nothing less than a shell-game and a scam.”

Summary of Complaint to UNEP 

• At least 45% of the 40 corporate groups represented on the TNFD taskforce face serious environmental and human rights concerns. This includes current legal cases, ongoing complaints, exclusions by investors, persistent environmental violations or other controversies. Promoting these corporations as thought leaders undermines the work of environmental defenders and CSOs seeking to hold these companies to account. 
• The creation of an all-corporate taskforce undermines the principle of centering environmental defenders in decision-making or basic due process. 
• Up to 98% of feedback to the TNFD during its drafting was made in secret. Similarly, it failed to provide information in a format accessible to environmental defenders. TNFD had no process to engage with grassroots women’s organizations and did no gender analysis of its proposed framework. 
• The complaint highlights clear ways that TNFD is not ‘aligned’ with the Global Biodiversity Framework, despite claims that it is. 
• TNFD is not evidence-based. It had no process to assess what interventions work, or do not work, to shift corporate behaviour.
• Some business lobbies, and others, are now promoting TNFD in the Global Biodiversity Framework negotiations or in national laws. As an initiative decided by corporations, for corporations – this is a back-door for corporations to write their own regulations. TNFD has refused to state that it is an inappropriate basis for regulation. 
• TNFD has distracted from the actual priorities of environmental defenders including Indigenous Peoples, women, local communities, environmental defenders as well as other civil society organizations. This includes calls for liability and redress: stronger laws and enforcement that see corporations face meaningful legal and financial consequences for harms done, and communities have access to remedy and redress. 

Further reading:

UNEP complaint on TNFD: https://forestsandfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/24Oct2024_Complaint-to-UNEP-on-TNFD-1.pdf

Background document on voluntary initiatives: https://en.milieudefensie.nl/news/voluntary-market-mechanisms/view

Banking on Biodiversity Collapse 2024: https://forestsandfinance.org/banking-on-biodiversity-collapse/