USS holdings: historical

A DivestUSS factsheet

DivestUSS is a group of members of the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), the largest pension scheme in the UK with over £70bn of assets. The following is a summary of some key features of the history of their investments in fossil fuels [1].

Summary:

  • USS has made major investments in fossil fuel companies for many years. In the twenty years up until 2019, for example, either Shell or BP were amongst the four largest holdings overall, and in eight of those years both were in the top four. The investment in Shell reached as high as £538m in 2019. 
  • More broadly, USS has invested in large numbers of significant fossil fuel companies; an average of 30 over the period 2010-20, for example. 
  • The number of fossil fuel investments has increased markedly in the past few years – from 21 in 2014 to 46 in 2023.
  • In contrast, the number of fossil fuel companies in USS’s top 100 investments has fallen from 8 in 2014 to 4 in 2023, and the total amount for these companies has dropped, for example from £1,377m in 2019 to £179m in September 2023.
  • It is not possible to determine the exact total value of fossil fuel investments as USS does not provide amounts for holdings below its top 100. An estimate suggests that this total has not decreased in recent years [2].
  • USS also holds 46 of the top 190 companies in the “Climate Wreckers” index – the companies with the biggest fossil fuel expansion plans [3].
  • In terms of financing fossil fuels, USS also held shares in 33 of the top 60 lenders to fossil fuel companies worldwide [4].
  • All of these numbers underestimate USS’s investment in fossil fuels as only about 30-40% of their portfolio is in listed equities, with a similar percentage in bonds and fixed income assets, plus significant private market investments such as owning 10% of Heathrow [5].

References:

[1] The investments considered here are public equity holdings, as listed on the USS website. See https://www.uss.co.uk/how-we-invest/where-we-invest/public-market-investments

for a recent listing. The top 100 equity holdings are listed, with all holdings searchable by name and also in the page source code. The all holdings list does not include amounts. Past investments have been gathered using the Wayback Machine. These links are the source of data quoted and can be found in the Appendix of the 2022 DivestUSS Report “The Universities Superannuation Scheme’s Response to the Climate Emergency”. “Fossil fuel companies” are defined in that Report.

[2] The value of fossil fuel holdings outside the top 100 investments may be roughly estimated by multiplying the number of such holdings by one half of the value of the 100th highest investment. Adding this to the known fossil fuel holdings value from the top 100 list gives an estimate for the total. For example, for 2021 this gives £1,073m and for 2022 it gives £1,243m.

[3] The “Climate Wreckers” Index is made up of the 190 publicly-listed companies from all over the world with the biggest plans to expand the scale of the fossil fuel industry. https://www.marketforces.org.au/campaigns/super/climatewreckersindex/

[4] “Banking on Climate Chaos” lists the fossil fuel financing from the world’s 60 largest banks.

[5] 2022 USS Annual Report, p.22.  https://www.uss.co.uk/about-us/report-and-accounts

DivestUSS January 2024.