With nearly $17 trillion under management combined, BlackRock and Vanguard are the world’s largest investors in fossil fuels and companies driving deforestation and human rights abuses across the globe. Due to their massive investments, BlackRock and Vanguard have an outsized influence at fossil fuel companies, energy utilities and financial firms. Since 2018, the BlackRock’s Big Problem network has campaigned on BlackRock to put climate justice front and center in its business practices. And in 2022, a new campaign was launched to also pressure Vanguard to act on climate.

In March 2022, we launched the ‘Wall Street’s Moment of Truth” campaign to push major investors, including BlackRock & Vanguard, to vote yes on climate resolutions at the Annual General Meetings (AGMs) of US banks and insurance companies. From STMP’s email list, more than 60,000 people sent emails to banks, insurers, and investors, 1,000+ people made phone calls to our targets, 75,000 people signed our campaign petition and 120 organizations signed our sign-on letter. We also supported many of our coalition partners in organizing their own digital actions on our targets. In addition, there were high-impact, in-person actions at the AGMs of all of our main targets.

BlackRock makes statements — but doesn’t take action

In January 2020, under pressure from a growing global campaign, BlackRock introduced its first ever policy to address its role as the world’s biggest investor in coal. While this is a notable first step, if you look closely you’ll see this coal exclusion policy applies to less than 20% of the global coal industry.

That’s simply not enough to tackle the problem of coal emissions, let alone oil and gas which BlackRock has done next to nothing about. And while the company made a nice sounding statement about agribusiness related to deforestation, it has made no actual commitments on changing its investments in the industries driving deforestation in the Amazon and globally.

What is BlackRock’s Big Problem?

BlackRock has shown that it can change and claims that it wants to change the financial sector to be more sustainable, but we need to hold BlackRock accountable to its promises and raise the bar on what leadership looks like.Now more than ever we must make sure BlackRock backs its initial promises with action, and expands its commitments to truly live up to what is needed for a liveable, thriving climate.

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  • BlackRock is still the largest investor in both new coal plant development and existing coal reserves worldwide
  • It remains one of the world’s largest investors in oil and gas companies
  • It continues to be the largest investor in companies driving deforestation in critical ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest

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