DiCaprio, along with 400 institutions and 2,000 other people, promised to eliminate his fossil fuel investments Tuesday, PEOPLE reports.
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The report, launched in New York by investment consultancy Arabella Advisors, did not specify how much of the $2.6 trillion in overall assets represented by those that have pledged to divest was invested in fossil fuels.
“Climate alter is severely impacting the health of our planet and all of its inhabitants, and we must transition to a clean energy economy in that does not rely on fossil fuels”.
“Now is the time to divest and invest to let our world leader know that we, as individuals and institutions, are taking action to address climate change, and we expect them to do their part this December in Paris at the United Nations climate talks”, DiCaprio said.
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who established a fund for conservation projects in 1998, also announced that he would join the movement by divesting his assets and those of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation.
The divestment movement is not just about preventing the use of fossil fuels.
DiCaprio is divesting his own and his foundation’s fossil fuel holdings, said Ellen Dorsey, a coalition leader and the executive director of the Wallace Global Fund, an environmental grantmaker.
The burgeoning divestment movement, similar to other efforts to divest from apartheid-era South Africa and the tobacco industry, now encompasses many segments of society, including the faith-based community, which is committed to divesting $24 billion in assets, and universities, whose commitments almost tripled in the past year to include 40 educational institutions with $130 billion in assets, $98 billion of which are held by the University of California.
The scale of the recent success enjoyed by the global divestment movement was today underlined with the publication of new figures showing fossil fuel divestment pledges have now exceeded $2.6tr globally.
“That underscores what I see every day as a financial advisor – that the demand for fossil-free investment products is increasing”, he said. “More and more investors are looking at the risks of not getting getting away from fossil fuels”. The report found that taking action to cut carbon pollution and slow global warming by investing in energy efficiency and renewable power generation would result in a positive return on investment, ultimately saving trillions of dollars.
“The leaders of several of the largest institutions to divest in the past year have cited climate risk to investment portfolios as a key factor in their decisions”, the report found.
“Pope Francis told us this past June in his encyclical that the earth is a gift from God and that we are responsible for protecting it”, said the Rev. Fletcher Harper, executive director of GreenFaith.
While divestment advocates have long argued moral and health reasons organizations should divest, they now say there’s a financial incentive as well.
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Institutions committing to divest from fossil fuels, broken down by sector. Some investors are seeing that as a threat of fossil-fuel companies, and are opting to dump their shares.
