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Article

30 Aug 2019

Author:
Al Jazeera

BlackRock in Amazon: 'World's largest investor in deforestation'

…[A] report released on Friday shows that BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, holds extensive investments in the sectors deemed responsible for the devastation of forests in Brazil.

With $6.5 trillion of assets under management, BlackRock was labelled the "world's largest investor in deforestation" by the report's authors - Friends of the Earth US, Amazon Watch, and Dutch research firm Profundo.

The report, BlackRock's Big Deforestation Problem, looks at financial data from 2014 to 2018 showing the global investment management firm to be among the top three shareholders in 25 of the planet's largest publicly traded companies with "deforestation risk".

The data reveal that BlackRock's holdings in six sectors - soy, beef, palm oil, rubber, timber and pulp/paper - have increased by more than $500m in the last five years.

Jeff Conant, the report's lead author and senior international forest programme manager with Friends of the Earth US, said that "BlackRock's investments are directly causing the forest fires in the Amazon and deforestation around the globe".

"I don't believe that BlackRock and their providers are even looking at deforestation risk," he told Al Jazeera. "There are not a lot of worse companies out there than the companies on [our] list."…