Leonardo DiCaprio Continues to Fight For the Health of Our Planet

“After looking into the growing movement to divest from fossil fuels and invest in climate solutions, I was convinced to make the pledge on behalf of myself and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation“.

“Climate change is severely impacting the health of our planet and all of its inhabitants, and we must transition to a clean energy economy that does not rely on fossil fuels, the main driver of this global problem”, DiCaprio said in a statement.

Wallace Global Fund executive director Ellen Dorsey, left, and actor Leonardo DiCaprio pose after a news conference for the Divest-Invest Coalition, Tuesday, September 22, 2015, in New York.

CLARIFICATION: The headline and text of this story have been amended to clarify that the $2.6 trillion figure represents the total amount of divestment that has been pledged, not just divestments that have been completed. “People and institutions grounded in market data and trends are getting out of fossil fuels before the carbon bubble bursts and assets are stranded”, according to a Divest-Invest statement.

In recent years, schools, private foundations, pension funds and individuals have taken up the call to divest, which refers to removing investments from industries such as oil, natural gas and coal.

Some of the most prominent institutions that have agreed to divest from coal, oil and other fuels that emit planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions include the Rockefeller Foundation, Guardian Media Group, University of California system, California Pension Funds and the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund.

Climate risk to investment portfolios is helping drive the exponential growth of divestment.

It’s often said that the divestment movement won’t be able to put a serious dent in the fossil fuel industry’s bottom line, but that outlook seems to be changing-at the very least, the increasingly massive commitment total (that’s $2.6 trillion, once again) demonstrates in clear terms the moral gravity of fossil fuel investment.

The group says 430 institutions and over 2,000 people have signed on. They’ve been joined by philanthropic organizations, state governments, faith-based institutions, medical organizations and celebrities.

A movement that began on college campuses to reverse investments in fossil fuel companies is now measuring its impact in the trillions. “In the past year alone, that means that we’ve seen a 50 fold increase in the commitment to divest from fossil fuels”. Analyses from Citigroup, HSBC, the worldwide Energy Agency, Bank of England, and others have yielded evidence of a “significant, quantifiable risk to portfolios exposed to fossil fuel assets in a carbon constrained world”, it said.

“The greatest investment capital shift in history will be long and complex”, said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The divestment movement is aimed in part at influencing global climate talks, which will come to a head in Paris in December, when governments will try to agree on a new global climate treaty that would apply to all countries after the year 2020.