To: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

Kensington & Chelsea Council Divest from Fossil Fuel Investments

Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council has almost £61 million invested indirectly in fossil fuel assets. We call on the Council to divest of these investments and pass a motion to ban any new direct or indirect investments in fossil fuels.

Why is this important?

It is imperative to divest from fossil fuel investments for both ethical and financial reasons.

To avoid catastrophic climate change and keep global temperatures below more than 2ºC above pre-industrial levels, more than 80 per cent of the world’s known coal reserves, 30 per cent of known oil and 50 per cent of gas reserves are unburnable.[1]

Oxfam has already confirmed that the poor and struggling people that they work with are reporting ever-changing and unpredictable weather patterns, which contribute to deeper and longer lasting floods in South Asia; irregular rainfall in Mozambique, or hotter temperatures that are melting glaciers in Bolivia and Tajikistan.[2]

Climate change may also wipe out $2.5 trillion, or 1.8 percent of the world's financial assets by the end of this century if the planet continues to warm at its current rate, according to a recent study in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change.[3]

In a speech at Lloyd’s of London in September 2015, Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England said that by the time ‘climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late’. Carney warned investors that policies to address climate change ‘would render the vast majority of reserves ‘stranded’ – oil, gas and coal that will be literary unburnable’. [4]

Many have already divested. AXA in 2015 announced that it was selling $500 million of coal stocks.[4]

We therefore believe that the Council should help prevent climate change and reduce its exposure to climate and carbon related risks by divesting of these assets.

[1]
https://www.carbonbrief.org/meeting-two-degree-climate-target-means-80-per-cent-of-worlds-coal-is-unburnable-study-says
[2]
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what-we-do/issues-we-work-on/climate-change#8f355e95-4248-47d2-8973-920be53a9fde
[3]
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04042016/study-warning-wall-street-financial-risks-stranded-assets-climate-change-trillion-dollars
[4]
http://www.carbontracker.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/CAR3817_Synthesis_Report_24.11.15_WEB2.pdf