WWF - For a living planet

Influencing the world’s financial markets is an essential part of WWF’s drive to achieve a One Planet Future, where people and nature thrive together.

Finance serves every economic sector that has major impacts on our environment, including energy production, fishing, agriculture and logging. We need to ensure that money is only invested in areas that protect the planet and push us towards a low-carbon future.

The challenge

Action is required urgently. For example, the investment decisions made for the energy sector in the next decade will determine its infrastructure for the first half of the 21st century. To achieve the carbon emission cuts needed to prevent disastrous changes in global temperature, investments must be pulled out of carbon intensive sectors such as the Canadian oil sands, and diverted to cleaner energy solutions.

Shifting our financial markets will involve working on a range of complex and interrelated issues:

• financial systems prioritise economic outcomes, looking for short-term wins rather than at the long-terms need of the environment. This means that the environmental cost of business activities is seldom factored into investment decisions.
• financial markets are fragmented, meaning that individual and institutional investors find it difficult to track where their money is being spent and the impact it makes.  
  
• financial markets pursue unlimited growth, which ultimately cannot be sustained in a world with finite natural resources.

What is WWF doing about it?

WWF has already had major breakthroughs, including forcing the UK government’s Export Credit Guarantee Department to back out of the unsustainable Sakhalin II project.

We work with partners such as Fair Pensions to ensure people’s pension schemes are more ethical and sustainable and Banktrack to ensure pressure is put on large financial institutions to make ethical investments. We also work with investors, banks and insurers to challenge the energy sector about its impact on the environment.

More recently we are seeking to address systemic barriers to change and to create new innovations and possibilities for the future. This work involves bringing together leading figures who have a stake in the finance system to create a sustainable vision and action plan for change.