France
Lucie Pinson has, for the last decade, been fighting to stop financial institutions from funding fossil fuel expansion and is the founder of Reclaim Finance
About France
France is a country primarily located in Western Europe. Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the North Atlantic, the French West Indies, and many islands in Oceania and the Indian Ocean. Metropolitan France shares borders with Belgium and Luxembourg to the north; Germany to the northeast; Switzerland to the east; Italy and Monaco to the southeast; Andorra and Spain to the south; and a maritime border with the United Kingdom to the northwest. Its metropolitan area extends from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea.
Source: Wikipedia
Metropolian France faces major environmental challenges related to climate change, water stress, chemical pollution, and biodiversity loss. As France also covers many overseas teritories and regions the problems also become more diverse including the known real threats to small island states and tropical rainforest
About Lucie
Lucie's account is best delivered in her own words "My environmental journey didn't begin with nature—it began with social and economic justice. I was driven by the belief that inequality is shaped by political and economic choices, and I quickly realised the same was true of the climate crisis.
Climate change is not just an environmental issue: it is the result of financial and political decisions, and it affects people unequally depending on their income, race, gender and where they live. Understanding that finance sits at the heart of both inequality and the climate crisis shaped everything that followed.
For more than a decade, I have worked to stop financial institutions from funding fossil fuel expansion. I first helped build the global movement to end coal finance before expanding that work to oil and gas.
Along the way, our campaigns have contributed to the cancellation of numerous fossil fuel projects, pushed major financial institutions to transform their policies, and helped shift vast amounts of capital away from fossil fuels.
In 2020, I founded Reclaim Finance to hold the financial sector accountable for its role in the climate crisis.
Take the world's largest insurers. They continue to insure new fossil fuel projects, making their expansion possible, while at the same time they are increasingly expected to protect society from the devastating impacts of climate change—impacts that their own business decisions help to worsen. As climate risks grow, they raise premiums, withdraw coverage from entire communities, and continue distributing billions in profits to shareholders.
Our work is about acting on both sides of this contradiction: stopping insurers from fuelling the crisis while making sure they also take responsibility for the damage it is already causing."
In 2020 Lucie was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for her tireless work decarbonizing finance
Watch the portrait's story
This video shows the painting process, and tells some of Lucie's story.
