Former chief advisers to UK and European commission add their support to Guardian campaign for Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust to divest

Senior scientists including former chief advisers to the UK government and European commission have called on the world’s two largest health charities to sell their investments in leading fossil fuel companies.



They argue that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust should offload their holdings in major coal, oil and gas corporations because the investments are undermining the charities’ aims.

“There’s an anomaly there. It is like giving with the one hand and taking with the other,” said Prof Anne Glover, who was chief scientific adviser to the European commission until last year.

“These are leaders. These are people that others look to. So they have enormous responsibility. That’s why for me it is important that they react to this.”

She said there was a lack of progress in the development of cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels. “Gates and Wellcome and many others are huge investors,” she said. “Their endorsement or investment in the accessing and using of fossil fuels – it makes a big impact. If they were to reconsider and think about investing elsewhere, they could use their power as investors in a very positive way.”

On Monday, the Guardian launched a major campaign to encourage the two charities to divest their endowments from fossil fuels. By Friday over 100,000 people had signed the petition with supporters including actor Tilda Swinton, activist Bianca Jagger, Costa award-winning author Helen Macdonald and chef Yotam Ottolenghi.

“[By signing the petition], individuals can say that this matters to us. I don’t think [the Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust] are organisations who don’t care about what people think about them. I think that they will listen. It really matters that people make their voice heard,” said Glover.

“We have to leave more of the fossil fuel that has sequestered over millennia in the ground,” said Lord May, the UK government’s former chief scientist. “If we continue to extract it unremittingly, there’s no doubt that we are not going to be able to stay within any plausible envelope of a habitable Earth.”

Divestment from the most intensive fossil fuel companies would send a clear signal about the urgency of this challenge, he said.

Sir Bob Watson, former adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, also urged the charities to rethink their investments. “The more people invest in fossil fuel companies, the more these companies will exploit fossil fuels,” he said.

The scientists have cast a spotlight on the tension between the funders’ shareholdings in fossil fuel companies and the grave toll that climate change, driven by burning the fuels, threatens to inflict on public health.

“One of the major impacts of climate change is on human health, especially in developing countries through vector borne disease and heat stress,” said Watson. “This is where Wellcome and Gates have put a huge amount of money.”

Professor Chris Rapley, former director of the Science Museum, said the position of Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation is “fundamentally inconsistent”, adding that as scientific thought leaders, any gesture was particularly powerful.

“We have to confront our own inconsistencies,” he said. “Either they accept the argument that we need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels or they don’t. It’s highly symbolic when charities like this make a stand.”

But he added that there was still room for the industry to change. “Threats to divest from fossil fuel-based companies and expose the potential carbon bubble, should be tempered in such a way to strongly encourage the industry to invest seriously in solving the technical challenges of carbon capture and storage - or better carbon capture and utilisation.”

A spokesman for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said: “Bill is privately investing considerable time and resources in this effort and the breakthrough innovations needed and will continue to speak out about it. We respect the passion of advocates for action on climate change, and recognize that there are many views on how best to address it.”

A spokeswoman for the Wellcome Trust said climate change and health was “a highly complex issue which we take seriously in our decisions and on which we engage with policymakers, researchers and the businesses in which we invest.”

Maria Neira, director of public health and environment at the World Health Organisation, warned last year that climate change will cause an extra 250,000 deaths per year between 2030 and 2050, mostly from rises in malaria, diarrhoeal diseases, heat exposure and inadequate nutrition.

Last year Wellcome gave £727m in grants in fields including ebola and cancer research. In total, the Gates Foundation has given $32.9bn in grants to health programmes around the world. Its work focusses on prevention, immunisation and vaccination.

The Wellcome Trust’s endowment originates from funds left by Sir Henry Wellcome, the co-founder of a successful multinational pharmaceutical company, after his death in 1936.

“Given that Henry Wellcome essentially gave away his fortune in the hope of making the world better, I can only believe that he would be on the side of the people who want to keep the carbon in the ground,” Lord May said.

The global divestment movement, which is encouraging investors to sell their fossil fuel holdings is growing rapidly with over 200 organisations worth over £33bn signed up.

The driving force for many is the calculation that existing fossil fuel reserves already hold far more carbon than can be burned while still having a hope of keeping the global temperature rise below 2C.

“If we don’t do that we are leaving a dreadful legacy for the next generation,” said Glover.

Sir Martin Rees, of the University of Cambridge and former president of the Royal Society, said: “Obviously it’s important that most fossil fuel reserves remain underground, rather than being exploited.”

However, the case for divestment is less obvious, he argues. “I think our cause would be far more effectively boosted if Bill Gates stood up and made eloquent speeches at [ExxonMobil’s] AGM than by divestment,” he said. “The one thing that is clear, I think, is that large charities shouldn’t hold big shareholdings in these companies and remain passive.”

Sir John Beddington, former government chief scientist, agreed that fossil fuel reserves could not continue to be burnt without major technological advances in carbon capture technology, although stopped short of backing the call for divestment. “The sums are pretty clear,” he said. “What’s under the ground cannot be burnt within a 2C framework unless you have some method of sequestering the carbon dioxide or that you change in other ways.”

Additional reporting by James Randerson