From London to Vienna: How Campaigners Fought Fossil Finance This Spring

Author: Klara Butz, Finance Campaigner at The Climate Reality Project Europe

Spring is coming to an end, and so is the season of shareholder meetings. These annual general meetings (AGMs) are like corporate birthday parties: companies host their own events, applaud themselves for the profits they’ve made, and get cheered on by shareholders eager for dividends.

But as you might know, campaigners like me love to crash these fossil-fueled champagne parties. We bring reality back into the room. AGMs are highly orchestrated affairs, driven by numbers and figures, pretending the economy operates outside our planetary boundaries.

During AGM season, finance campaigners often tour across Europe, showing up at the shareholder meetings of major banks to remind them of the real-life consequences of their fossil fuel financing. Some activists travel incredibly long distances to speak directly to board members.

Two of them were Avril de Torres and Patience Nabukalu, activists from the Global South. Banks like UBS, Standard Chartered, and HSBC are financing companies that are destroying their communities and ecosystems. Avril, Deputy Executive Director of the Center for Energy, Ecology, and Development, lives in the Philippines. San Miguel Corporation and Shell are expanding liquefied natural gas infrastructure in the Philippine Verde Island Passage, an area rich in marine biodiversity. Patience is campaigning against the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, a controversial project led by TotalEnergies that threatens ecosystems and communities in Uganda and beyond.

Attending AGMs as Global South representatives isn’t easy. Banks know that their testimonies could harm corporate reputations, and sometimes they try to silence them. That’s what apparently happened this year at HSBC’s AGM. Although Avril and Patience had registered their questions in advance, they were initially denied the opportunity to speak. Whether by design or technical glitch, the effect was the same: silencing. Only after a shouting match between campaigners and the board were they finally allowed to ask their questions.

While in London, Avril and Patience also met with Climate Reality Leaders to share their stories and connect with local communities. Thank you, Versha, for organizing such a powerful event!

But AGMs weren’t just happening in the UK. In the Netherlands, frontline communities and campaigners from BankTrack, Fossielvrij, and Milieudefensie visited ING Bank’s AGM. They brought a 12-meter-long "Bill of Destruction" listing the social and environmental damage linked to ING’s fossil fuel investments. John Beard, Founder and CEO of the Port Arthur Community Action Network, traveled from Texas to urge ING to stop funding LNG projects. In the US Gulf South, low-income Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities living near these facilities face severe climate impacts, toxic pollution, and elevated rates of cancer and respiratory disease. ING directly finances seven LNG terminals. As John asked ING’s board: "Does ING care and respect that all people have inalienable human rights to clean air, a healthy and sustainable living environment, and the right to a safe climate? When is ING going to take responsibility, as I’m outlining here in this bill, for the harm done to communities in the Gulf?"

In Germany, most AGMs are held online, which makes it harder to organize physical protests. But our colleagues at Urgewald didn’t let that stop them. Dressed as business professionals, they traveled to Frankfurt and staged a theatrical protest outside Deutsche Bank’s headquarters. Deutsche Bank remains one of the world’s top fossil fuel financiers, and frankly, it doesn’t seem too worried about its public image. That might be why it continues to resist public pressure.

ING’s “Bill of Destruction”. Photo: Laura Ponchel, Fossielvrij NL

But not all banks are the same. Some CEOs greet activists at the door, take a flyer, and genuinely listen. At Erste Group’s AGM in Vienna, campaigners from Fridays For Future Austria, Urgewald, and a Romanian activist opposing the massive Neptun Deep gas project presented their demands. In response, the bank’s Chief Risk Officer promised to update its sustainability policy. Let’s see if words lead to action. One thing is certain: we’ll be back next year to hold them accountable.

Check out some of the amazing organizations that attend AGMs: 

Center for Energy, Ecology, and Development (CEED), BankTrack, Fossielvrij NL, Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands), Port Arthur Community Action Network (PACAN), Urgewald, Fridays For Future Austria, Reclaim Finance, ShareAction, ReCommon.