The Church Commissioners and the Church of England Pensions Board have pledged to divest £12 million ($18.3 million) in thermal coal and oil sands holdings from their £6.1 billion portfolio.
“The focus of the investing bodies must be on assisting the transition to a low carbon economy.”—Rev Canon Professor Richard BurridgeThe group said it would no longer invest in any company that derived more than 10% of its revenue from extracting or producing these fuels and announced the adoptions of a new climate change policy.
“From an ethical perspective, the focus of the investing bodies must be on assisting the transition to a low carbon economy,” said Rev Canon Professor Richard Burridge, deputy chair of the Church’s Ethical Investment Advisory Group. “The church has a moral responsibility to speak and act on both environmental stewardship and justice for the world’s poor who are most vulnerable to climate change.”
The new climate change policy will focus on engagement with companies in which the group holds shares, and will concentrate on those which produce significant greenhouse gas emissions, such as energy firms. The group said this was aimed to help a global transition to a low carbon economy.
“We want to be at the forefront of institutional investors seeking to address the challenge of energy transition,” said Tom Joy, director of investments at the Church Commissioners. Joy said along with engagement, the new policy would permit the investment team to exclude companies where they thought further discussion would “not be productive”.
This week, the nonprofit Asset Owners Disclosure Project criticised investors for not doing enough to support a transition to a low carbon economy, while a study from the American Petroleum Institute said investors maintaining fossil fuel holdings had outperformed their peers in recent years.
Next week, CIO will report on a day spent with asset owners protesting at the BP annual general meeting and finds out what investors really feel about fossil fuel investment–and how much change they can make happen.
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