Investors managing $39 trillion have called on governments to raise their climate ambition, including setting plans to phase out fossil fuel use and forcing companies to set out science-based transition plans.
Countries will have to start delivering on emissions-reduction targets during the 2020s, rather than later, to avoid devastation from climate change, the British president of the upcoming COP26 climate summit says.
This year's United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland must kick-start a decade of action to address the environmental crisis, U.S. climate change envoy John Kerry said on Tuesday during a visit to European Union headquarters in Brussels.
In the past, shareholder votes on the environment were rare and easily brushed aside. Things could look different in the annual meeting season starting next month, when companies are set to face the most investor resolutions tied to climate change in years.
British naturalist David Attenborough warned on Tuesday that climate change is the biggest security threat that modern humans have ever faced, telling the U.N. Security Council: "I don't envy you the responsibility that this places on all of you."
France's largest bank BNP Paribas pledged on Monday to stop financing firms producing or buying either beef or soybeans cultivated on land in the Amazon cleared or converted after 2008.
Investors are judging how well energy companies have reoriented their businesses to cut emissions as they weigh activists' calls for divestment, climate finance specialists said.
