Investing in humanity: The BMJ’s divestment campaign

Fossil fuels

In a previous BMJ editorial, Law and colleagues argued that the case for divestment from fossil fuels is now clear cut.6 Extraction of fossil fuels damages our planet. Products of the fossil fuel industry harm health, causing global conflict, driving climate change through carbon emissions, and shortening lives through air pollution. Yet politicians refuse to relinquish their political and commercial links to fossil fuels, and fossil fuel companies manipulate science to downplay the ill effects of their business. This allows us all to continue the convenient fantasy that all is well with the way we live.

Consuming our planet’s fossil fuel reserves will ensure we miss carbon emission targets. Although the industry shows little sign of changing its strategy, the financial world is waking up to the threat to investments as well as to the planet. The governor of the Bank of England considers fossil fuels a risky investment because the demands of meeting the 2°C climate target will render the majority of oil, gas, and coal reserves “stranded” and “unburnable.”7 In 2017, at the One Planet Summit in Paris, the World Bank announced its intention to end financial support for oil and gas extraction in response to the threat posed by climate change.8 Recently, the European Investment Bank, the European Union’s lending arm and the world’s largest multilateral financial institution, stated its ambition to become the world’s first “climate bank” by ending its multibillion euro financing of oil, gas, and coal projects after 2021.9

With this editorial, we launch a campaign for divestment from fossil fuels. Our campaign is aimed at health professionals and medical organisations, since divestment is one way of exerting influence on politicians and industry on behalf of our patients and the public. An immediate objective of the campaign is to gain commitments from health professionals and medical organisations to divest from fossil fuel industries. Our long term ambition is that those commitments will be acted on in order to influence politicians and industry. Investment is a choice, and it is now easier to identify sustainable and ethically sound investments that will benefit rather than harm health.10 None of this lessens the responsibility of individuals and organisations to limit their own effect on climate. You will find more on our green journey at www.bmj.com/about-bmj/how-green-is-the-bmj.

The BMJ applauds organisations such as the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of General Practitioners, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, the medical associations of America and Canada, and the BMA, our owner, for committing to divest from fossil fuels. For our part, we will not accept advertising or research funded by companies that produce fossil fuels. We will also explore how else our business might be dependent on fossil fuel companies and take steps to end any such reliance. The BMA has no direct holdings in tobacco or fossil fuel companies.

Our new policy towards the fossil fuel industry may seem a minor concession since we receive little or no revenue from this sector. But as our online usage grows rapidly to an increasingly diverse international audience we expect The BMJ will become a more attractive route to market for companies beyond our traditional pool of advertisers. We are clear that income from companies that produce fossil fuels is revenue that The BMJ does not want now or in the future.

Most importantly, we seek your commitment and invite you to sign our online declaration of intent to divest from fossil fuels (https://bit.ly/bmjdivestment) We urge you to follow up your commitment by implementing divestment in your personal finances and in the medical organisations that you belong to. We urge medical organisations to join us in taking a lead to create better health through divestment. We will allow medical organisations to record when they have successfully implemented divestment. Often, individuals and organisations are motivated to divest but don’t know how. In collaboration with the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change (which the BMA and BMJ help to fund) we offer guidance to help you successfully divest (box 2).11

Next steps

We will consider what else to add to the divestment list. Other industries, however, may be more complex in terms of making a case for divestment. For example, how do we tackle the food and drink industries, many of whose products are beneficial to health but others contribute to the global crisis of non-communicable diseases as well as driving climate change? Even beneficial products can be harmful in excess and damaging to the environment. Workable criteria will help decide which other industries should join tobacco and fossil fuels as targets for divestment. We propose possible criteria in box 3. We welcome your views on these criteria and on our fossil fuel divestment campaign overall.

Hope is not yet abandoned in our world today; it is merely besieged. Divestment offers us an opportunity to end despair and disempowerment, to begin to reclaim our world from misguided political and commercial agendas. By divesting now we wish to restore hope for the future wellbeing of our planet and for human health.