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This week not one but two banks made public statements distancing themselves from the proposed expansion of the Abbot Point coal export terminal in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area.

After Deutsche Bank declared that they would not finance the port expansion due to UNESCO’s concerns about its impacts on the World Heritage Site, I challenged HSBC the following day to match this commitment. The response was that, given the concerns of the World Heritage Committee over Abbot Point, HSBC would be “extraordinarily unlikely to go anywhere near it”.

This is a great step forward for the campaign but it raises the question: where are the Australian banks on this? We now have Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Credit Agricole (a French bank that ruled out financing Abbot Point in a letter to us) with more progressive positions than banks in Australia. Surely it should be the Aussie banks standing up most for this precious natural icon?

So let’s make it happen. You can start by sending the big four Australian banks an email, calling on them to match or better the commitments we’ve seen from the European banks. The big four play a crucial role in supporting fossil fuel projects in Australia so making sure they don’t finance the expansion of Abbot Point will be a critical step towards stopping this dirty coal export expansion once and for all.

It’s worth reminding ourselves what we’re dealing with here. Expanding Abbot Point would involve dredging 3 million cubic metres of seabed from the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, dumping it in the marine park, building coal export terminals that can export 130 million tonnes of coal per year, sending hundreds more ships through the Reef each year, all to allow mega coal mines to be opened up in the Galilee Basin, exporting coal so expensive it would cost twice as much to generate power as it currently does in India, and then have an increase in carbon emissions of hundreds of millions of tonnes per year.

This is environmental and economic vandalism and has to be stopped. Please send an email to Australia’s big banks asking them to follow the lead of the statements we’ve seen from Europe. I’m sure it’s the first of many actions we’ll take to deliver this outcome.

By the way, after my last email we received a number of responses asking if there was a way to write to Deutsche Bank and say thanks for taking the position they did. We agree this is important and so have created these email actions to send both Deutsche Bank and HSBC an email to say thank you. Julien, on behalf of Market Forces