New York - Institutional investors managing trillions of dollars should shift their portfolios away from fossil fuel investments toward cleaner energy sources to put a stop to the dangerous rise in global temperatures causing climate change, says the United Nations' climate chief.
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change, told an investors conference at the UN that their investment decisions should reflect the latest scientific evidence of dangerous climate change to protect the health and financial savings of ordinary citizens well into the future.
She said: "The pensions, life insurances and nest eggs of billions of ordinary people depend on the long-term security and stability of institutional investment funds.
"Climate change increasingly poses one of the biggest long-term threats to those investments and the wealth of the global economy," Figueres added.
Gas emissions
She said the private sector would need to play a crucial role to ensure that global temperatures do not rise more than 2°C, a threshold that UN scientists have said would avoid catastrophic climate change even as nearly 200 countries continue to negotiate a global deal to rein in global greenhouse gas emissions.
"No matter how many efforts we make... that is not enough to put us on track to the 2 degrees," she told a news conference.
The fraught UN climate negotiations have a 2015 deadline to agree in Paris on a global plan to address climate change set after an eleventh-hour agreement at the last UN summit held in Poland in November.
Contributions
The 2015 deal will consist of a patchwork of national plans to curb emissions that could blur a 20-year-old distinction between the obligations of rich and poor nations.
Figueres said she expects the first of the national contributions to trickle in around September, when UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon hosts a UN climate change summit that will involve heads of state, business and civil society groups.