World's largest banks pumped $906 billion into fossil fuels in 2025, NGO study finds

By Jag Jivan 

The world's 65 largest banks collectively committed $906 billion to fossil fuel companies in 2025, an increase of nearly 8 percent from the previous year, according to the seventeenth edition of the Banking on Climate Chaos report released in June 2026. The report, produced by a coalition of environmental and advocacy organisations including Rainforest Action Network, tracks lending and underwriting by major financial institutions to companies across the oil, gas, and coal sectors. Since the Paris Agreement went into force in 2016, the report finds that these banks have together channelled $8.7 trillion into fossil fuels — an amount the authors argue, had it been directed toward renewables, would have made the global energy system significantly more affordable, resilient, and climate-proof.

The most striking finding of this year's report concerns the sharp surge in financing for fossil fuel expansion. The top 65 banks committed $508 billion in 2025 to companies actively expanding oil, gas, and coal operations — a jump of more than 27 percent in a single year. The report identifies this as uniquely consequential because expansion financing locks in decades of future carbon emissions and energy infrastructure, well beyond the mid-century targets set by climate science. Banks increased their financing to companies expanding midstream oil and gas projects — pipelines, storage terminals, LNG facilities — by an astonishing 83.8 percent, or $116 billion, compared to 2024.

A particular concern flagged by the report is the growing concentration of fossil fuel financing in fewer hands. Just twelve banks, dubbed the "Dirty Dozen," now account for nearly 39 percent of all fossil fuel deals globally among approximately 2,000 banks tracked in the study's broader dataset. JPMorgan Chase remains the single largest fossil fuel financier in the world, having committed $58.2 billion to the sector in 2025 alone — up 12.5 percent from the previous year. It is followed by Bank of America, Japan's Mitsubishi UFJ Financial, and Mizuho Financial. On the borrowers' side, just ten fossil fuel companies absorbed $718 billion — nearly 13 percent of all bank fossil financing over the past five years. The US LNG export company Venture Global was the single largest recipient of bank fossil financing in 2025, receiving $32.9 billion, a staggering 631 percent increase from the previous year.

The report identifies six financial centres — the United States, Canada, Japan, China, the United Kingdom, and the European Union — as responsible for 87 percent of all global bank fossil financing. US banks alone account for 32.2 percent of the worldwide total, a share that has steadily grown from 28.3 percent in 2021. The authors are clear that systemic change depends primarily on legislative and regulatory action in these six jurisdictions.

Not all trends point in the same direction. Twenty-six of the 65 banks reduced their fossil fuel financing in 2025, with European institutions leading the way. French bank La Banque Postale made history as the first among the tracked banks to commit zero dollars in financing to in-scope fossil fuel companies. BNP Paribas reduced its fossil financing by 27.8 percent and Swiss bank UBS by 36.3 percent. However, the report notes that even banks showing reductions continue to finance expansion companies and have weakened their formal climate policy commitments.

The report situates this surge in financing within what it calls a "new age of fossil energy instability," shaped by two major supply shocks of the 2020s: Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the US-Israel war on Iran in 2026. The latter resulted in what the International Energy Agency described as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. While oil and gas companies reaped windfall profits from these crises, the costs were distributed downward — to households, energy-importing governments, and vulnerable economies — through spiking electricity bills, fuel shortages, credit downgrades, and fiscal tightening.

India is specifically identified as among those nations absorbing the Iran oil shock through its government balance sheet. As a net oil importer, India has faced a weakened sovereign debt environment and a deteriorating fiscal position as it has been compelled to absorb rising import costs paid in US dollars. The report notes reports of shortages of cooking gas in India as one of the on-the-ground consequences of the disruption. India's banks, meanwhile, account for 1.5 percent of global fossil fuel financing in the BOCC+ dataset — a relatively small but not insignificant share — with State Bank of India ranked 39th among the 65 banks surveyed and recording a 162.9 percent increase in fossil fuel expansion financing between 2024 and 2025, one of the steepest rises in the study.

The policy environment for banking-sector climate commitments deteriorated markedly over the past year. The Net-Zero Banking Alliance effectively ceased operations in October 2025, and the report documents a third consecutive year of banks weakening or abandoning climate targets. North American banks including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, RBC, and Bank of Montreal removed exclusions on Arctic oil and gas activity. Wells Fargo and Scotiabank abandoned their 2030 decarbonisation targets entirely, with Scotiabank also cancelling its 2050 net-zero goal. The report argues that this pattern of policy backsliding, compounded by political pressure from the US Trump administration, has provided a social licence for increased fossil financing and further concentrates control over the global energy system in an ever-smaller group of banks and companies.

The report concludes with an unambiguous demand: banks must immediately halt financing for fossil fuel expansion, wind down all sector financing, and redirect capital at scale toward renewable alternatives. Governments in the six major financial centres must move beyond voluntary commitments and enact comprehensive legislation requiring a coordinated phase-out of fossil fuel financing.