Josephine Moulds

Josephine Moulds is an award-winning investigative journalist at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, where she works on a project examining banks, financial institutions and climate change. Her coverage stands out for tracing the money behind the climate crisis, showing how major lenders, investors and insurers turn climate risk into profitable business while publicly promising climate leadership. She brings more than fifteen years of financial reporting at national newspapers to a beat that sits between corporate finance and environmental harm.

Banks, climate pledges and coal finance

Moulds devotes much of her reporting to examining how big banks handle coal and other fossil fuel exposure in light of their climate pledges.

At the Bureau she has uncovered how HSBC helped arrange billions of dollars in loans for RWE, a coal company whose operations included bulldozing a village, despite public commitments around cutting coal funding. She has reported how HSBC raised $1bn for Glencore in 2023, in tension with the bank’s pledge to stop supporting companies increasing oil production, and how the deal related to coal production in Colombia.

Her investigations show how banks classify and count deals, including revealing that HSBC treated financing for mines, pipelines and oil rigs as “sustainable” finance to hit a $1 trillion target. She uses detailed loan data and climate-focused banking analyses to compare lenders’ public commitments with the structure and timing of their financing.

The result is coverage that focuses on the mechanics of corporate banking rather than simple statements about climate policy.

Barclays, climate risk and extreme weather profiteering

A second strand of her work looks at how banks turn climate-driven crises into commercial opportunity, with Barclays a recurring subject.

In her reporting on Barclays’ response to extreme weather and looming food shortages, she highlighted internal messaging that framed a catastrophic food crisis threatening millions with hunger as an opportunity for profit. She set that against the bank’s wider role in funding activities that contribute to the climate crisis, including emissions that drive the wildfires and harvest failures now treated as a business opportunity.

Her work in this area combines analysis of investor communications with political and civil society reaction, capturing criticism from figures who urge customers to respond to perceived corporate greed by moving their business. This line of reporting contributes to a broader body of work on banks’ green pledges, for which she has been recognised in industry awards covering investigations into HSBC, Barclays and a contentious oil and gas auction.

The emphasis is consistently on how climate risk is priced, marketed and sold inside financial institutions.

Climate finance, development and global South impacts

Moulds extends her scrutiny of climate finance beyond commercial banks to development finance and government-backed institutions. In an investigation into UK climate aid, she showed how deals labelled as “climate finance” by British International Investment increased the profits of large corporations while doing little to cut emissions or build climate resilience, raising questions about who really benefits from public climate spending. Her reporting connects these flows of money to conditions on the ground, including coverage of how coal funding and other fossil projects shape energy and environmental policy in countries such as Indonesia.

She has written widely about the Democratic Republic of Congo, reporting on whistleblowers who faced violent reprisals after exposing profiteering in protected land and documenting the damage to mangrove parks from logging, smuggling and pollution. In related work she has covered communities resisting oil drilling plans in protected areas, highlighting how decisions made by banks, investors and governments translate into pressure on local people and ecosystems.

Across these stories she links climate finance and extractive projects to human rights, governance and environmental justice.

Greenwashing, lobbying and climate accountability

Another defining element of Moulds’s work is her focus on greenwashing and the gap between climate promises and actual investment behaviour. She has reported on “net-zero” banks raising around $1 trillion for major fossil fuel companies while marketing themselves as climate leaders, exposing the mismatch between their targets and their underwriting and lending. For the Guardian she has detailed how JP Morgan’s funds sold as “sustainable” invested hundreds of millions of pounds in Glencore, a mining group criticised for environmental breaches, and how legal structures allow fossil fuel companies to sue governments for passing environmental protections.

Her stories have explored corporate lobbying around climate regulation, including highlighting efforts within the financial and legal sectors to dilute climate rules while maintaining a public image of responsibility. She has also investigated how powerful firms, such as BlackRock, channel pension money into controversial investments, including Russian state-linked companies, and how they communicate different messages to different audiences. Her reporting has prompted tangible responses, such as Methodist churches filing a complaint against HSBC after her work on coal financing was published, underlining her focus on accountability as well as exposure. Throughout, she writes from within an environment team that explicitly frames its mission as holding banks and financial institutions to their climate pledges.

Before joining the Bureau’s environment project, Moulds spent more than fifteen years as a financial journalist working in-house at the Guardian and the Telegraph and freelancing extensively for the Times, primarily on business coverage. That background informs her current beat: she treats climate stories as finance stories first, tracing the role of banks, investors and insurers in shaping which projects go ahead and which communities bear the risk.

Her work now spans outlets including the Bureau, the Guardian and Grist, but remains driven by the same priority of following capital flows and testing climate claims against the deals that underpin them.