Yahoo Finance Mark Carney’s investment fund accused of deforestation
Mark Carney has been accused of climate hypocrisy after his investment company was revealed to have cleared vast swathes of tropical forest in Brazil.
The former Bank of England Governor, who has positioned himself as a green finance champion and is a special climate envoy for the United Nations, joined Brookfield Asset Management in 2020 and is currently the firm’s chairman.
But campaign group Global Witness has claimed Brookfield was responsible for 9,000 hectares of deforestation in Cerrado, a sensitive region of tropical savannah in Brazil.
The space cleared was roughly equivalent to 11,000 football pitches and was repurposed for farming soybeans.
Global Witness warned this had harmed local biodiversity and led to an estimated 600,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere, where previously it would have been absorbed by trees and other vegetation.
Just hours before the claims were published, Mr Carney gave a speech in Montreal about the “biodiversity crisis”, tweeting afterward: “We can't get to #netzero emissions without eliminating deforestation and accelerating nature-based solutions.”
He has also previously urged investors to “take ownership” of climate change and not “divest your way out of the problem”.
I’m happy to be in Montreal for #COP15 to discuss urgent action to address the #biodiversity crisis. We can't get to #netzero emissions without eliminating deforestation and accelerating nature-based solutions #GFANZ 1/5 pic.twitter.com/EPXnnbKJQn
— Mark Carney (@MarkJCarney) December 15, 2022
Veronica Oakeshott, forests campaign leader at Global Witness, said: “We couldn’t have put it any better than Carney has done himself.
“Brookfield should have restored the forest it destroyed and compensated the community.
“Simply walking away from a trail of destructive environmental and social impact, having profited from it, is not responsible, not ethical, and not the positive climate action required.
“Despite the company’s great wealth and Carney’s championing of climate causes, Brookfield has fundamentally failed to avoid contributing to climate destruction.”
Mr Carney did not respond to enquiries from The Telegraph on Friday and a spokesman later said he would not comment.
Brookfield said it has always acted in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations and followed the highest standards of ethical behaviour across all our global investments.
The asset manager added: “Brookfield made limited investments in Brazil’s agriculture sector during the last decade.
“The decision to sell these businesses was taken several years ago because the fund they were held in was reaching the end of its life, and we therefore had an obligation to return capital to investors.”
The spokesman said that the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, of which Mr Carney is co-chairman with billionaire Michael Bloomberg, had recently consulted on a set of policies to reduce deforestation and that Brookfield expected to adopt them in future.
Global Witness said the clearance in Brazil took place on parcels of land between June 2012 and June 2021 and was tracked using satellite imagery.
The land was owned by Brookfield through subsidiaries and investment funds, including an “agri fund” that counted Lancashire County Council Pension Fund and the London Pension Funds Authority among its backers.
It was then sold by the investment firm in 2021.
Mr Carney joined the company as vice-chairman in August 2020 and was appointed chairman in December 2022.
Brookfield insisted the UN climate champion had no involvement in any of the decisions related to forest clearance and that they were taken “long before” he joined.
