Divestment & Reinvestment

From The Guardian: A comprehensive overview of the basics of divestment: what it means, why the urgency and how it impacts climate change

Bill McKibben explains the case for divestment in this landmark article in Rolling Stone magazine.

Is divestment a useful strategy for mitigating climate change, or is it effective in other ways? View opinions in this New York Times collection of debates

Naomi Klein discusses fossil fuel divestment among environmental organizations in two articles published in The Nation magazine: Time for Big Green to Go Fossil Free and Why Aren’t Environmental Groups Divesting from Fossil Fuels?

Go Fossil Free is project of 350.org that coordinates an international network of campaigns calling on educational and religions institutions, governments, and other organizations that serve the public good to freeze any new investments in fossil fuel companies and divest from direct ownership and commingled funds that include fossil fuel public equities and corporate bonds.

The Guardian has ongoing coverage of fossil fuel divestment news.

The Fossil Fuel Student Divestment Network supports a growing student-led, university-centered divestment movement.

Influence Map is neutral and independent UK-based non-profit whose remit is to map, analyze and score the extent to which corporations are influencing climate policy and legislation worldwide.

Carbon Tracker is a not for profit financial think tank aimed at enabling a climate secure global energy market by aligning capital market actions with climate reality.

Research from Carbon Tracker calls for regulators, governments and investors to re-evaluate energy business models against carbon budgets, to prevent a $6trillion carbon bubble in the next decade. This report revealed that fossil fuel reserves already far exceed the carbon budget to avoid global warming of 2°C, but in spite of this, investors spent $674billion last year to find and develop new potentially stranded assets.

This report from Impax Asset Management Group explains why investors should consider reorienting their portfolios towards low carbon energy by replacing fossil fuel stocks with energy efficiency and renewable energy investments, thereby retaining exposure to the energy sector while reducing the risks posed by the fossil fuel sector.

The Carbon Underground 2015 identifies the top 100 public coal companies globally and the top 100 public oil and gas companies globally, ranked by the potential carbon emissions content of their reported reserves. The reserves of these companies total 555 gigatons (Gt) of potential CO2 emissions, almost five times more than can be burned for the world to have an 80% chance of limiting global temperature rise to 2°C (3.6° F).

Through this Investor Briefing, the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative provides a case for why and how investors and their service providers should start measuring, disclosing and reducing the GHG emissions associated with their investments and investment portfolios.