This post is by Jo Blackman, head of forest advocacy and policy at Global Witness

Since 2017, major UK banks and finance institutions have either provided or facilitated more than £500 million to the Brazilian arms of three of the world’s largest beef companies, all linked to deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, as our new Global Witness investigation reveals, and hundreds of millions more have flowed into their subsidiary companies. Drawing largely on publicly available data, our exposé found that a chain of actors from cattle ranchers through to multinational beef traders, their US and European auditors, international financiers and the governments that regulate them, are complicit in deforestation. It also uncovered devastating cases of human rights abuses against indigenous and landless peoples. Unless these issues are confronted, the world’s biggest rainforest could face an irreversible tipping point that might destroy its ecology and the communities that live in and rely on it.