In February this year, several Non-Governmental Organisations called on institutional leaders to immediately freeze any new investment in fossil fuel companies, and to divest from direct ownership and any commingled funds that include fossil fuel public equities and corporate bonds within five years.
The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has also called upon companies to reduce their investment in fossil fuel, or to divest completely. His campaign has included urging companies like pension funds or insurance companies to reduce their investments in coal and a fossil-fuel based economy to move to renewable sources of energy.
According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), around 80 per cent of known fossil fuel reserves would need to remain in the ground for the international community to reach its declared goal of staying below a maximum two degrees Celsius global average temperature rise.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is also supporting calls for investors to divest from fossil fuel assets.
The UN agency, which is in charge of global climate change negotiations, says it is lending its “moral authority” to the divestment campaign because it shares the ambition to get a strong deal to tackle global warming at the UN Summit in Paris in December.
“We support divestment as it sends a signal to companies, especially coal companies, that the age of ‘burn what you like, when you like’ cannot continue,” Nick Nuttall, the UNFCCC spokesman, was quoted by The Guardian as saying earlier this year.
However, the move is likely to be controversial as the economies of many nations at the COP21 negotiations in Paris heavily rely on coal, oil and gas.
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