Hundreds of thousands of academics, engineers and lawyers in Denmark are set to vote on divesting their €32bn (£23bn) pension funds from the fossil fuels that drive climate change.

The first of a series of resolutions will be filed on Monday asking six funds to dump their coal investments by 2018 and exclude high-risk oil and gas projects such as tar sands extraction and Arctic drilling.

Campaigners are hopeful of success after resolutions demanding divestment from all fossil fuels were only narrowly defeated in 2014. The pension funds, which Danish professionals are obliged to join, cover almost 5% of the nation’s workforce.

“The Danish energy sector is obviously more green than elsewhere in the world, but even in Denmark we have a responsibility to do our absolute best to drive the [green energy] transition and part of that is moving out of black money,” said Prof Thomas Meinert Larsen, at Copenhagen University and part of the Danish Fossil Free Campaign. “I care about the future for the coming generations.”

The Danish move is part of a fast-growing climate change campaign that has already persuaded 180 institutions, worth $50bn (£33bn) and including local authorities, universities and churches, to sell off their investments in coal, oil and gas.



A series of analyses have shown that there are already three times more fossil fuels in proven reserves than can be burned if catastrophic global warming is to be avoided, as world leaders have pledged. The campaigners argue that the trillions of dollars companies are still spending on exploration for even more fossil fuels is a danger to both the climate and investors’ capital.



The six funds being targeted provide pensions for academics (MP Pension), engineers (DIP and ISP), lawyers and economists (JØP), architects (AP) and veterinarians (PJD), over 200,000 people in total.

The resolution filed to each fund will ask the board to “exclude investments in the 100 largest coal companies as soon as possible, but at the latest before the end of 2018, and to engage in, and annually document, a dialogue with owned oil and gas companies to exclude their investments in high-risk extraction projects, eg tar sands, deepwater drilling and drilling in Arctic.” The votes will take place in April.



In 2014, resolutions urging divestment from the top 100 coal and top 100 oil and gas companies by 2020 were filed at three of the funds received and received significant support: MP pension (49% in favour), DIP (46%) and JØP (38%).

“I think that probably for these three pension funds, we will have a majority this year,” said Meinert Larsen. “We have the impression the pension boards are moving.”

Other major financial institutions in Scandinavia have already divested from fossil fuel stocks, with the region’s biggest fund manager Nordea and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund (the world’s biggest) both blacklisting coal companies, while Denmark’s largest pension fund, PFA, is excluding tar sands companies.

The fossil fuel divestment campaign has been backed by the anti-apartheid campaigner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, while the heads of the Bank of England and the World Bank have both warned that action to cut carbon emissions would devalue fossil fuel investments.