OUR IMPACT IN 2025

Together we are making a difference

Por Market Forces

06 de May de 2025

Thank you so much for your generous support of Market Forces. Together, we are having an impact.

Mitsubishi withdrew from a proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminal and associated gas power plant in Bangladesh! This win came after years of pressure from Market Forces and the awesome allies we work with in Bangladesh and Japan.

Just some of the work we’ve done this year to pile the pressure on Mitsubishi and other fossil fuel developers has involved:

publishing a research report revealing key Japanese companies plan to build nearly nine times more gas power than renewables in South and Southeast Asia
running an ad in the Financial Times Asia, calling out companies over their involvement in Bangladesh gas projects.

New policies from Commonwealth Bank and NAB ruled out new finance for most coal, oil, and gas companies pursuing fossil fuel expansion plans!

Thanks to pressure from people like you, Commbank now has the strongest climate policy of any major Australian bank.

We launched an update of our Compare Banks table, which outlines the fossil fuel financing and policy positions of Australian retail banks, and helps customers to contact their bank directly. 20,000 messages have been sent to banks since 2018!

We’ve been highlighting the serious social, human rights, environmental, reputational and financial risks related to the planned Papua LNG project. We had a win when two more banks, Italy's Intesa Sanpaolo and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), confirmed they would not finance the project.

In March, we filed a complaint with corporate regulator ASIC, alleging that Woodside potentially misled or deceived investors.

We supported Gomeroi Traditional Owners and health professionals to attend the Santos AGM and directly raise their concerns with the Santos board.

We also ran a targeted advertising campaign directing financial backers of Woodside and Santos to our analysis highlighting serious climate risk concerns.

AustralianSuper, HESTA and Hostplus are having trouble telling their climate claims apart from gas industry spin. So our new campaigners Dorothy and Toto delivered these funds some crucial missing parts!

We conducted a YouGov survey and found a significant majority of Australians believe that expanding renewable energy is better than adding gas power.

Three out of five people agreed that expanding renewables such as wind and solar with battery storage is a better solution to meeting Australia’s energy needs than adding gas power

Macquarie was dealt the biggest vote against a bank on climate grounds in Australia’s history! Macquarie faced its first ever climate-focused resolution as 180+ shareholders joined Market Forces, Australian Ethical, Ethinvest and SIX - Sustainable Investment Exchange to call on the bank to reveal its full fossil fuel exposure.

Over 35% of Macquarie shareholders voted for the bank to clean up its act on climate.

With 228 amazing supporters, we funded a full page ad in the Australian Financial Review, calling out Macquarie for being a major backer of the companies pursuing fracking in the Beetaloo Basin.

The ad ran the day of Macquarie's AGM, and every dollar raised was matched by EthicalJobs.com.au!

We delivered an open letter, signed by 10,000 people, calling on Macquarie to live up to its climate commitments and stop backing fracking.

Otterly adorable scenes across Australia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, Netherlands and the US as we called on SMBC to stop financing dirty gas as part of World Otter Day.

SMBC needs to stop funding fossil gas projects that are heating the planet, hurting its mascot 🦦 and risking its financial health.

We developed the first ever Fossil Fuel Company Blocklist for Australian banks: 23 fossil fuel customers of the big four banks whose business models are currently incompatible with the climate goals of the Paris Agreement and must be ineligible for any new or renewed finance.

We found:

In the decade since the Paris Agreement the big four have provided $43.4 billion to the world’s biggest coal, oil and gas companies, including over $30 billion for expansion.
Westpac and ANZ are backing a new wave of destructive fossil fuel expansion, while CommBank and NAB have started cutting ties with major climate contaminators.

At APA Group’s annual general meeting, community leaders from the Northern Territory, climate scientists, doctors, and shareholders united to deliver one message the board could not ignore: You can’t claim climate action or Paris-alignment while building pipelines that would unleash over a billion tonnes of emissions from the Beetaloo Basin.

The Empire Strikes Out! Empire Energy, one of the chief proponents of dirty fracking in the Northern Territory’s Beetaloo gas basin, had a tense AGM after we discovered Empire relied on outdated gas demand projections in its capital raise presentation. We submitted a complaint to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) on the morning of Empire’s AGM.

“Empire Energy has made an extraordinary admission that it used outdated industry forecasts overstating gas demand to sell the viability of its Beetaloo fracking plans to raise capital from investors.”

We supported impacted community members and shareholders to ask questions at Empire’s AGM, leading to a notable admission from the CEO that major backer Macquarie had not placed any environmental or climate change conditions on its financial support for Empire.

We published Australia's Gas Guzzlers, a report identifying the largest industrial gas-using facilities in Australia and pathways for their decarbonisation. The report also explored the role of the LNG industry in Australia, demonstrating the opposing interests of the LNG and manufacturing industries. We found that Australia’s gas industry uses more of its own gas than any other sector of the economy. The gas industry alone burns more gas just to operate LNG export terminals than the entire Australian manufacturing sector!

We’ve been working with HESTA members to build pressure on their fund to live up to its climate leadership claims and reject new fossil fuels. Two community organisations, Amnesty International Australia and the Centre for Non-Violence, cut ties with HESTA over its fossil fuel investments. Both organisations wrote HESTA out of their enterprise bargaining agreements, opting for fossil fuel-free funds.

Following this, members rallied outside HESTA's Melbourne office to mark the three-year anniversary of their fund putting oil and gas companies Santos and Woodside 'on notice,' but failing to adequately hold these companies accountable for their polluting oil and gas expansion plans. Organisations representing more than a million health and community services workers around Australia endorsed our full page ad in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s The Age, backing members' demand that HESTA say no to new fossil fuels.

We have been increasing pressure on the banks funding Harita, a company building new coal power plants in Indonesia to produce nickel, a key metal in the clean energy transition.

Market Forces coordinated an action in Jakarta with movement allies, featuring a Trojan Horse installation highlighting how coal finance is being hidden within “transition” funding.

Market Forces supported a new and unique photo exhibition by Bangladeshi photographer Noor Alam in Tokyo. The photography captured how the daily lives of communities in the Matarbari region of Southeastern Bangladesh - including fishing, farming, and family life by the sea - continue under the expanding shadow of coal and gas-fired power plants.