Meet the Climate Activist Trying to Get Banks Off Fossil Fuels

In May, BNP Paribas SA, the European Union’s biggest bank, announced that it had effectively quit underwriting bonds for oil and gas producers.

It’s part of a bigger shift that’s been underway at BNP — and one that Lucie Pinson, who heads the Paris-based nonprofit Reclaim Finance, has been watching develop through the company’s financial statements. Reclaim Finance’s approach to activism involves closely tracking the activities of big financial institutions and working with employees inside these banks to steer them away from funding oil and gas projects.

“We focus more on financial flows and less on the exposure of financial institutions to ...