The United Nations climate chief has warned that the pensions and retirement funds of billions of people around the world are being put at risk by global warming.
Christiana Figueres, who heads the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), has called on investors to pull their money out of fossil fuel linked investment funds.
According to a report by Britain’s BBC radio service she said institutional investors would be in blatant breach of their fiduciary duty if they ignored the “clear scientific evidence”.
Ms Figueres said that they should put their money into green assets instead.
The BBC reports the issue of investing in oil, gas and other fossil fuel-backed funds has provoked a heated debate over the past 12 months.
Environmental campaigners have argued that if the Earth is to avoid dangerous climate change, defined as temperature increases above two degrees Celsius, then up to three quarters of the coal, oil and gas that remains must be left in the ground.
The BBC reports says some financial experts have argued that if these resources are essentially declared worthless, this will have a major impact on the share values of the fossil fuel corporations that own them.
Now Ms Figueres has joined the voices calling on investors to get out of high carbon assets.
“The continued and dangerous rise in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is in large part the direct result of past investments in energy and mobility systems based on the use of fossil fuels,” Ms Figueres told an audience of investors and corporate leaders in New York with more than $20 trillion in combined assets.
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New investments must now assist in reversing this unsustainable trend, and quickly if the world is to have a chance of staying under a 2C temperature rise,” she said.
Ms Figueres argued that investment decisions needed to reflect the science.
Climate change, if left unchecked, could devastate the lives, livelihoods and savings of billions of people into the future.
The BBC reports last November at a conference in Warsaw, Ms Figueres lambasted the coal industry and challenged it to divest from carbon.
She is now concerned that too few companies have disclosed the full picture of their holdings in fossil fuel resources.
Ms Figueres said that huge opportunities existed for investors in climate friendly assets.
According to the International Energy Agency, the world will need to invest $36 trillion in clean energy by 2050 to keep the Earth on track to stay below a 2.0°C rise.
Negotiations on a new global treaty on climate change stuttered last year, but the intervention of UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon might give the process some momentum later this year.
The UNFCCC hopes to successfully conclude a comprehensive global deal by the end of 2015.
