Fossil fuel divestment is not enough to tackle climate change

For more than a decade, UK students have urged universities to withdraw their investments in the fossil fuel industry. The success of these campaigns has been remarkable. Late last year, the number of UK universities committing to fossil fuel divestment reached 100 – well over half the sector. The signatories include the universities and many colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, whose combined endowments are worth billions of pounds, as well as the likes of Edinburgh, Manchester and Kings College London, with their hundreds of millions.

There are still holdouts, not least Imperial College London, whose endowment is worth £542 million. Still, for the most part, the divestment movement can claim victory. Which raises the question: what next?

Of course, investments are just one of many ways in which universities provide legitimacy – also known as social license to operate – to the fossil fuel industry. New campaigns are now brewing aimed at ending fossil fuel industry funding for climate research (foxes guarding the henhouse, anyone?) and the active promotion of careers in the sector to students.

But back to those billions in investments. Is divestment the only way universities can mobilise their capital to address the climate emergency?

Well, for a start, it’s not just fossil fuel companies taking a wrecking ball to the planet. Sure, they are the worst offenders, but divesting from them only blunts the knife slicing through our collective future. And you don’t need a medical degree to know that even a blunted knife can still cut deep. To tackle the climate crisis and actually build a just, sustainable future, we need to pull the knife out fully, stem the bleeding and begin to heal longstanding wounds.

That means action well beyond fossil fuel investments. Take a look at the investment portfolio of any university with a strong fossil fuel divestment commitment and you’ll still see companies directly enabling the fossil fuel industry’s disastrous expansion plans: banks such as Barclays, NatWest and JP Morgan that continue to provide financing and financial services for them; major insurance companies such as Lloyd’s of London that insure them and utilities that construct pipelines and other infrastructure essential for enabling long-term fossil fuel expansion.

Beyond fossil fuels and their enablers, there are major mining companies, whose record of cultural and environmental destruction and human rights violations – including forced evictions – is well documented. And there are large agricultural companies, part of an industry responsible for at least 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Pulling out the knife, then, demands economic transformation far beyond the fossil fuel industry – and fast. As well as mobilising their unique status as centres of knowledge and cutting-edge research to build and communicate the case for this, universities must engage with all these industries on their climate progress, with divestment an option as a punishment for insufficient progress. They must vote against the re-election of directors who fail to take proportionate climate action – and against the reappointment of auditors who sign off on business projections built on unsustainable assumptions, such as the full use of all fossil fuel reserves. And they must demand that asset managers immediately halt support for financing fossil fuel expansion through debt purchasing and company and project financing.

Often, divestment advocates are maligned as naive – doubly so when the conversation moves beyond fossil fuels to other harmful industries. “What can we invest in?” is the common, and completely reasonable, response. But while much of the global economy isn’t going anywhere, and needs to move quickly from being part of the problem to driving the solution, we also need to quickly scale up new and emerging sectors to stand a chance of meeting global climate goals – not to mention tackling rampant inequality, racial injustice and other global crises.

Standard “sustainable investment” approaches usually focus on excluding “controversial” (and therefore economically unstable) companies from portfolios. This does nothing to unleash the new flows of capital needed to scale up renewable energy projects, social housing or regenerative, sustainable farming projects. We need universities to start directing their billions into impact investments, which target both stable returns and measurable positive impacts.

According to exclusive new data just released by climate justice charity People and Planet, just 7 per cent of UK universities have so far committed formally to reinvesting capital into community renewable energy or campus renewable energy projects. With a landmark High Court ruling this year confirming that charitable trustees can choose to invest explicitly for environmental and social outcomes, and with increasing numbers of endowed charitable foundations placing their capital in gold-standard impact schemes with insurgent investment firms such as Wheb, Abundance, Thrive, Triodos and Snowball, it’s past time for universities to start investing their enormous endowments for impact.

A final word on justice and fairness. Universities have grown rich on investments in fossil fuel companies and often – looking further back – slavery and other injustices. It’s not enough just to halt these destructive investment practices. Meaningful action must involve mobilising this accumulated capital for the construction of a new circular economy that can secure a just, sustainable and equitable future for all.

Divestment was just the beginning. There is much left to do.

Zak Coleman is campaign manager at Invest for Change. He was previously undergraduate president of the Cambridge Students’ Union.