Investing for Our Future

A top U.N. climate change official, Christiana Figueres, last week urged investors to accelerate the greening of their portfolios as a crucial step towards a low-carbon economy that can better cope with the threats of, and seize opportunities from, climate change. She called on investors to move out of high-carbon assets and into assets built on renewable energy, energy efficiency and more sustainable ways of business that green global supply chains.
The biennial Investor Summit on Climate Risk aims to catalyze and scale up investor action, while underlining the risks to investments, including pensions and nest eggs worldwide from business as usual. She stated “The longer we take on achieving final clarity on policy, the more the risk goes up for investors and it is in the investor community interest to have policy sooner rather than later.” According to the International Energy Agency, $36 trillion of global investment in clean energy will be required to meet the internationally agreed goal of limiting global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius.
The summit is co-organized by CERES – a coalition and network of more than 130 pension funds, investors and non-profit organizations, the UN Fund for International Partnerships and the UN Foundation. It takes place ahead of the UN Secretary General’s Climate Summit, slated for this September and which is anticipated to build momentum for a strong global climate agreement in 2015.