The academic report of a survey into USS members’ preferences on sustainable investment has now been published https://www.netspar.nl/assets/uploads/Netspar-Design-Paper-228-WEB.pdf This revealed strong support for sustainable investing.
The government is reported to be standing by in case of the collapse of Thames Water [“UK government convenes emergency talks over Thames Water” FT 28th June 2023]. One of the largest shareholders in Thames Water is the Universities Superannuation Fund (USS), who doubled their holdings to a nearly 20% equity stake in December 2021. DivestUSS […]
On Friday 24 March 2023 we held the Divest USS: Help stop your pension fuelling climate change online forum for university staff and students as part of UK Divest’s national Day of Action. You can watch the recording here. The event was chaired by Ellie Harrison (University of Dundee) and featured presentations about the Divest […]
We’re working with Students Organising for Sustainability (SOS-UK) to encourage students to get involved in the Divest USS campaign. If you’re a student at a UK University, there’s a simple action that you can take. Please download our template motion and ask your Students’ Union/Association Representatives to submit it to your University’s finance committee. Please […]
USS keep arguing that it is their fiduciary duty to focus on generating as much income from their investments as possible despite the evidence that many members want them to stop investing in fossil fuels and other high carbon investments and also stop funding new oil and gas fields through corporate bonds. This article makes […]
DivestUSS members met with USS in December 2022 to press them to take the actions we recommended in our Report. A summary of the meeting and USS’ response to our arguments follows.
USS should be listening to Universities as to how they determine their investment strategy. Vice Chancellors, Principals and Finance Officers all need to be assured that their staff can be confident of pension returns long into the future. However the Climate Emergency and USS’s policy of continuing to invest in companies that are exploring and […]
USS regularly publish a list of their top 100 public equity investments and along with this, provide a search engine so that one can search to see if they have a holding in individual companies (but if not in top 100 they don’t tell you how much they hold in that company). See https://www.uss.co.uk/how-we-invest/where-we-invest/public-market-investments The June 2022 […]
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/thames-water-fined-4-million-after-catastrophic-sewage-blunder website 27/5/21 Thames Water has been fined £4 million after untreated sewage escaped from sewers below London into a park and a river. In New Malden The court was told approximately 79 million litres of sludge escaped across an area of about 6,500 square metres. It took 30 people a day for almost a […]
USS holding £ 92 million in Glencore https://www.uss.co.uk/how-we-invest/where-we-invest/public-market-investments Glencore being fined over one billion dollars for ‘Foreign bribery and market manipulation’ https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/glencore-entered-guilty-pleas-foreign-bribery-and-market-manipulation-schemes Glencore being fined over 28 million dollars by UK Serious Fraud Office https://www.sfo.gov.uk/2022/06/21/serious-fraud-office-secures-glencore-conviction-on-seven-counts-of-international-bribery/ ABP exits Glencore https://www.ipe.com/news/abp-exits-glencore-investment-over-human-rights-concerns/10055740.article
If you have ever contributed to USS, some of your money is supporting illegal settlements in Palestine. On the USS website list of investments can be found several of the 112 companies identified by the United Nations in 2020 as doing business in illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian land. Many of the 112 companies are […]
We have met recently with USS and were informed of their plan for interim targets for their pathway to ‘net zero by 2050’. Worryingly these interim targets – 25% reduction by 2025 and 50% by 2030 – are based on carbon intensity rather than absolute emissions. Using carbon intensity means that if the fund grows, […]
