The Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD) is a government department that provides government-backed financial guarantees and insurance to private corporations. This support is made available to help UK exporters to do business and win contracts abroad, particularly in financially and politically sensitive parts of the world that private sources of finance are not always willing to cover. ECGD backing can also provide the necessary reassurance to encourage private investment in a project.

The department was established in 1919 to help the UK recover its export markets after the First World War. It now derives its authority from the Export and Investment Guarantees Act of 1991 and is overseen by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the Treasury.

ECGD support is most commonly sought for aerospace, large infrastructure, and defence projects. These categories of projects are often synonymous with damaging social and environmental impacts.

For example, ECGD has supported the supply of 299 aircraft in the last five years. This is equivalent to adding more than the BA fleet, and its consequent emissions, to the global airline industry.

The infrastructure projects that ECGD supports are frequently large oil and gas developments. In 2004 ECGD supported the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline. The pipeline is the second longest in the world and crosses ecologically sensitive areas in regions prone to earthquakes. Project operators, BP, have failed to implement environmental best practice in the construction of the pipeline and fact finding missions by NGOs have highlighted numerous allegations of human rights abuses and other negative social and environmental impacts.

Despite the significant impacts of projects supported by ECGD no project has ever been denied support on environmental grounds. Indeed aerospace and defence transactions, which made up 71% of its business last year, are not even screened by ECGD for their social and environmental impacts.