By Richard Curtis

Someone said something really striking to me the other day – that weather used to be the last thing on the news, but now it’s the first. And it’s not good news. Fire, floods, drought – climate change in terrible and obvious action. It made me think of something I’ve been increasingly obsessed by – unexpectedly – which is pensions. Pensions used to be the last thing on our minds, certainly not something to talk about at lunch, but to help tackle the climate crisis, they actually should now be the first.

With delegates from across the world gathering in Glasgow this November for Cop26 – the most important climate negotiations for a generation – pensions should be right at the heart of the conversation. They can be a huge and radical agent for change: a powerful weapon in our armoury for the battle against the climate crisis.

Over the past 18 months, I’ve been part of the Make My Money Matter campaign, a partnership of the public, businesses and financial institutions that’s pushing to make sure that the trillions of pounds – yes, trillions – that are invested through our pension funds help tackle the climate crisis, not fuel the fire. With £2.6tn invested in UK pensions alone, and more than $50tn worldwide, our campaign believes pensions to be citizens’ hidden superpower in fighting against catastrophic climate change.

Until recently, people like me never thought about where our pension money went and the impact it had. Our pensions have often left us accidental investors in many of the practices we condemn, and the causes we fight against. Since we launched, I’ve heard from peace campaigners unwittingly invested in weapons, doctors invested in tobacco, and environmentalists invested in coal, oil and deforestation. There’s a brilliant Ted talk by a cancer doctor called Bronwyn King who discovered that a lot of her money was invested in tobacco companies – she’d actually been killing more people with her investments than she’d been saving with her life’s work.

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