As we commemorated World Environment Day this year, my campaigner’s mind felt a twinge of sorrow. This year’s theme is ecosystem restoration – which brings to mind practices we can adopt to protect the environment: tree planting and coastal clean-ups . People have been misled into believing that individual actions to protect our environment will determine our future, and if not, we’d have failed. The greatest threat to ecosystems, and humankind, is the fossil fuel industry and its carbon emissions. Right now, financial institutions are providing more money to the coal industry since the Paris Agreement. According to Climate Action Tracker, most countries are not aligned with their Paris goals. We need a radical shift in how governments and financial institutions continue to invest in and profit from dirty energy. China, Japan and South Korea declared net-zero goals – a clear indication that they understand business cannot go on as usual. The Asian Development Bank, the top lenders to the coal industry globally – Japan’s MUFG, SMBC, Mizuho – and the top coal underwriter, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, have also made climate declarations. But there’s more talk than actual climate action. As a climate movement, we must hold these institutions and their declarations to account — demanding that they support just, clean community-led energy solutions. As people, we need to stop blaming ourselves for climate suffering that’s fuelled by greed and denial. These declarations indicate that investors know coal is not only bad for us, it’s bad for business. These banks can choose the right side of history, and become climate leaders, by ruling out fossil fuels. When it happens, this victory will belong to us — the people — won through years of painstaking community resistance. But this victory would be bittersweet for people who have lived through typhoons claiming lives and homes, or those who were forcibly displaced from ancestral lands due to fossil fuel infrastructure. It’s also filled with “what ifs” as the threat of “fossil gas” as a bridge fuel looms as a false solution. The Paris Agreement was clear. We must limit temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid catastrophic climate change. To do this, we must keep all fossil fuels in the ground and accelerate the transition to 100 per cent locally distributed renewable energy systems. Let’s work together and demand that governments and financial institutions uphold their climate promises. Our survival depends on it. Chuck Baclagon, finance campaigner, 350.org Asia