After hearing Joel Solomon speak in class about his passion about moving UBC towards divestment via his involvement on the Board of Governors, I wanted to learn more about divestment at UBC. I have heard a few of my friends talk about the issue, and I know I support divestment, but I don’t know a lot about where we’re at in the process of moving towards divestment, or how I can support the efforts as a UBC student.

So what is divestment? Divestment is basically shifting UBC’s investments away from fossil fuels (which currently make up 6% of the university’s investments). Students on campus have been fighting for divestment since 2013.

After doing a bit more research, I’ve learned a bit about how the university currently makes investments. After the Board of Governors considered a proposal for divestment in 2016, the board recommended that the university should create a Sustainable Future Fund.

The university did- so now UBC has two investment pools. One, the Sustainable Future Pool, invests in a way that lowers carbon emissions and avoids fossil fuel holdings. However, the sustainable fund is more volatile and smaller than the university’s main group of investments (in fact, the Ubyssey stated it’s only 1% of UBC’s endowment).

Recently, due to student activism, the AMS divested away from fossil fuels. And most students and faculty support divestment- with 76.9% of students agreeing that UBC should divest, and 61.9% of faculty echoing that opinion. 

I find it baffling that such an impressive, sustainable university that is leading the way on so many sustainability projects is still investing in funds that support fossil fuels. I think this is pretty hypocritical- if sustainability is really one of UBC’s key values, why isn’t that reflected in the way that the institution invests, especially when students and faculty members clearly support the divestment efforts?

It also makes financial sense to divest. An article on Financial Times says that sustainable investments outperform the market, particularly in the long term. In fact, the article says that 90% of academic studies that look at the relationship between sustainable investing and financial performance suggest the the responsible investing practices either have a positive or neutral impact on investment success.

I would love to go to a university that leads in sustainable practices in all of the possible ways to do so: through its buildings, its classes, its clubs, its policies, and its investments. I am still learning about divestment and am definitely not a finance student or whiz in the field, but it seems like it would simply make sense to move all investments towards social and environmental sustainability. I wish the university wasn’t so slow to make changes-I’m surprised that folks have been trying to get the university to divest since 2013 with only slight progress being made by the university since then. I am hopeful that getting awesome people on our Board of Governors, like Joel Solomon, will help shift the overall perspective of the board to be more favorable of the idea of divestment. That way, they can follow Joel’s investment ideas- invest in businesses with good values that do good work. Who knows- maybe UBC will have their own Stonyfield Yogurt story someday.