Climate campaigners protest at Edinburgh City Chambers over council pension fund investment in fossil fuels

Environmental campaigners have staged a James Bond-themed "Time to Divest” protest outside the City Chambers against fossil fuel investments held by the council’s pension fund.

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Timed to coincide with the COP26 global climate summit in Glasgow, the demo was one of several across the country organised by campaign groups Friends of the Earth Scotland, Platform and Divest Lothian to call on councils to divest from the companies they say are fuelling the crisis.

They said Scottish local authority pension funds alone have £1.2 billion invested in fossil fuels.

John Hardy (front) and other climate activists from campaign group Divest Lothian outside Edinburgh City Chambers Photograph: Colin Hattersley

Last week’s full council meeting in Edinburgh agreed to write to the Lothian Pension Fund to seek assurance on “the robustness of the fund’s response to climate change and the need for action” and an assurance that divestment will proceed for investments that do not meet criteria set under the financial sector’s Transition Pathway Initiative by 2025.

Susan Hamilton, of Divest Lothian, said: “It’s a step in the right direction that Edinburgh Council discussed the possibility of divestment from coal, oil, and gas by 2025 at last week's council meeting, but behind the technical language of the motion that the councillors passed is a failure to address the urgency of the climate emergency that they declared.

“The current motion does not provide a guarantee that fossil fuel investments will be sold - and certainly not in the timeframe demanded by science.

“Last week, the UN warned that the world is currently on track for a catastrophic 2.7 degree rise in global temperatures unless we drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions, so it’s vital this happens quickly.

“If the Lothian Pension Fund does not remove money from fossil fuel companies, it and the council are failing. There is evidence that funds which have divested perform as well, if not better, than ones still invested in fossil fuels. As Scotland hosts COP26, it's time for Edinburgh and Lothian councillors to stop funding fossil fuels."

Friends of the Earth and Platform recently published a report detailing £128 billion of fossil fuel investment from UK pension funds.

They say Royal Dutch Shell, the biggest beneficiary of fossil fuel funding from UK local government pensions, including Lothian, has been associated with environmental and human rights violations worldwide, with a Dutch court ruling in January that Shell must compensate a number of Nigerian villages for loss of life, illness and destruction caused by their pollution.

Robert Noyes, of Platform, said: “Every day that we put off divesting from fossil fuels, we keep pouring billions into companies’ harmful operations. With climate action more popular than ever, it is no longer acceptable for local authority pension fund managers to provide polluters cover from the kinds of policies needed to keep global heating below 1.5 degrees by staying invested.”

And Sally Clark, from Friends of the Earth Scotland, said: “While the planet burns, the flames are being fanned by local authority pension funds which have billions of pounds invested in climate-wrecking fossil fuels.“Councils must play their part in protecting the long-term future of their employees by ending their support for gas, coal and oil, and investing in building a cleaner, safer future for us all.”

Lothian Pension Fund said it welcomed the focus being placed on climate change and the of investment markets in the energy transition.

"LPF has a long-standing commitment to being a responsible investor and has a policy of engaging with companies and policy makers seeking real-world changes, rather than a policy of exclusion and divestment.

"More practically, the fund is investing in climate solutions such as renewable energy and has agreed not to subscribe to new equity and fixed income issuance from companies whose business plans are not aligned with the Paris Agreement.

“By engaging with the companies in which it owns shares, LPF strives to improve the sustainability of corporate strategy to the benefit of shareholders, and to the benefit of wider society. In contrast, a policy of disinvestment merely passes shares to less responsible share owners, who are less likely to hold management to account and achieves nothing in terms of real-world sustainability.”

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