THE New Zealand Superannuation Fund is among a group of powerful investors putting pressure on the world’s biggest polluters to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
The global campaign, dubbed Climate Action 100 plus, was launched at the One Planet Summit in Paris marking two years since the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement.
The summit brings together 225 of the world’s largest institutional investors which have more than $US26 trillion ($F54t) invested in 100 of the world’s largest emitters.
They include ExxonMobil, General Electric, and Rio Tinto.
Investor Group on Climate Change chief executive Emma Herd said investors were trying to force these companies to clean up their act by engaging with them.
“It would be a pretty brave company that would say ‘no’ to $26 trillion of assets under management,” Ms Herd said.
Companies’ performances in this area would be reported on each year so their improvements could be tracked, she said.
“We’ll be able to see just how effective investor engagement is.”
But New Zealand climate change lobby group 350 Aotearoa doubted engagement would work.
“We’ve had decades of shareholder engagement with the fossil fuel industry and we’ve seen very little result,” its executive director, Niamh O’Flynn, said.
The failure to include agriculture and livestock emissions into the campaign was also a lost opportunity, she said.
New research published last month showed livestock was directly responsible for about a quarter of industrial-age warming — and that did not include emissions from crops grown to feed them.
The New Zealand Super Fund has already quit or substantially reduced its investments in 300 fossil fuel companies as part of its own climate change strategy announced last year.
But it still has just over $US1 billion ($F2b) invested in 86 of the companies being targeted by the new campaign, and while it was ditching fossil fuels, it’s was buying up beef and dairy farms in New Zealand and Australia.
NZ Super Fund chief investment officer Matt Whineray said the 100 campaign was about “getting the largest emitters to get serious about climate change”.
