The global climate crisis is happening now, with extreme weather and rising sea levels threatening the lives of billions of people. Despite this, the Highland Council Pension Fund invests over £40 million in the fossil fuel firms most responsible for the climate crisis, including oil company BP and mining giant BHP.
This is despite Scotland hosting the UN climate talks COP26 and the Highland Council declaring a Climate Emergency in 2019.
Local authorities have the power and the responsibility to ensure local workers not only have a pension for their retirement, but also a future worth retiring into. Halting the extraction and expansion of fossil fuels is a matter of survival for us all. Our local leaders must act now.
Highland and Western Isles councillors must ask their pension fund managers to end their support for the companies driving the climate crisis. Instead we can invest our common wealth in ways that generate both social and financial return for local people and their future.
Please email your councillors to call on them to support fossil free council pension funds, and to adopt the Highland Charter for Responsible Investment which asks the Highland Council Pension Fund to develop an ethical investment policy.