In September 2025, the Forests & Finance Coalition executed a strategic recalibration of its investigative scope. For the prior decade, the coalition’s primary datasets tracked capital flows into "soft" commodities: beef, soy, palm oil, pulp, and paper. The 2025 expansion integrated "hard" commodities—specifically transition minerals including nickel, cobalt, lithium, and copper—into its transparency architecture. This shift was not optional. It was a data-driven response to a statistical reality: the banking sector’s financing of "green" energy mining had become a primary driver of tropical deforestation, rivaling industrial agriculture in specific biomes like the Indonesian rainforests and the Amazon.

The release of the report Mining and Money: Financial Fault Lines in the Energy Transition on September 3, 2025, marked this operational pivot. The coalition’s updated methodology now tracks financial flows to 111 mining company groups. The initial data harvest for the period 2016 to 2024 reveals a capital injection of $493 billion in credit (loans and underwriting) from commercial banks to transition mineral mining companies. As of June 2025, institutional investors held an additional $289 billion in bonds and shares. This creates a combined financial exposure of nearly $800 billion. These funds are not supporting benign extraction; they are capital expenditures for operations that frequently overlap with Indigenous territories and high-biodiversity zones.