BC Nurses: tell the BC Municipal Pension Plan to phase out fossil fuels

Open letter key points:

The burning of fossil fuels is driving the climate crisis.

The climate crisis is a health crisis: patients are already experiencing increased respiratory and heart disease, mental illness, and climate-related injury and death from climate change.

Pension funds around the world have already begun to phase out their fossil fuel investments, and have found the returns easy to replace.

The Municipal Pension Plan must direct the British Columbia Investment Management Corporation to phase out its fossil fuel investments.

BC Nurses - Sign the Open Letter!

The signed letter will be shared with pension fund and union leadership and may be published as an op-ed.

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Attn: The British Columbia Municipal Pension Plan Board of Trustees

Nurses Want Swift Action to Address the Climate Emergency: Get our pensions out of fossil fuels

As nurses, we’ve dedicated our careers to protecting and promoting the health of people across our province and beyond. Our world is facing a climate emergency, with temperatures around the world breaking records month by month and year by year. Extreme weather events are increasing, and in the past two years BC has seen devastating floods, heat events and wildfires, with serious impacts on human health. The climate crisis is a health crisis, with the World Health Organization calling climate change the biggest global threat to human health [1]. 

Nurses want to ensure that our patients and our families thrive in a world with a livable climate. The primary cause of climate change is the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. At last year’s  COP28 climate summit, nations of the world finally agreed to transition away from fossil fuels. We believe the only responsible course of action for British Columbia’s Municipal Pension Plan is to immediately end new investments in fossil fuels and phase out our pension fund’s current investments in the oil, gas, coal and pipelines that are harming human health and undermining our retirement security. 

Pension funds around the world have already realized that the fossil fuel industry is facing terminal decline. In February 2024, PFZW, the pension fund for Dutch healthcare workers, divested from 310 oil and gas companies due to their insufficient climate plans [2]. ABP, Europe’s largest pension fund, divested from fossil fuels in May 2024, saying that companies without credible plans to adapt to a low-carbon economy come with unacceptable risk. ABP said that it hasn’t had trouble replacing fossil fuels in its portfolio, stating that “anyone who looks back about 10 years will see that investments in oil and gas producers did not perform exceptionally well during that period”[3]. 

We are aware that the Municipal Pension Plan has committed to align our investment portfolio with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and that by 2030 MPP aims to cut the emissions intensity of our portfolio by 55 per cent. But this isn’t enough, as it still allows our retirement savings to be invested in oil, gas, coal and pipeline assets that are putting our climate and our retirement security at risk.

We ask that the Municipal Pension Plan acknowledge the consensus science that preventing catastrophic climate change requires an immediate end to expansion and the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels. That means ending any new investments in coal, oil, gas and related infrastructure and phasing out existing investments in fossil fuel assets. 

As nurses we want to be able to speak directly to our patients, residents, and clients and tell them that we are doing our best for them. We do not want our hard-earned retirement savings invested in the fossil fuels that are harming our patients’ health and undermining our future.

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This open letter is coordinated by Shift: Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health in collaboration with the Canadian Association of Nurses for the Environment. Please direct any questions to the Canadian Association of Nurses for the Environment British Columbia Representative, Agnes Black, at aggieblack1@gmail.com or reach out to Shift: Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health at info@shiftaction.ca. The signed letter will be shared with pension fund and union leadership and may be published as an op-ed. Individual names of signers will not be included in an op-ed without specific permission.

References used in this letter:

[1] World Health Organization. (2023 November 2). Climate change and noncommunicable diseases: connections. https://www.who.int/news/item/02-11-2023-climate-change-and-noncommunicable-diseases-connections

[2] Marchant, C. (2024 February 8). PFZW completes oil and gas divestment program. Pensions & Investments. https://www.pionline.com/esg/pfzw-completes-oil-and-gas-divestment-program

[3] Jacob, S., & Koc, C. (2024 May 28). Europe’s Biggest Pension Fund Sells €10 Billion in Fossil Fuels. Bloomberg. https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/europe-s-biggest-pension-fund-sells-10-billion-in-fossil-fuels-1.2078098#