After discussions about aligning its endowment investment practices with its sustainability efforts, Wesleyan University trustees have agreed the institution should stop investing in fossil fuels.
"Given the climate emergency, the investment and ecological risks associated with fossil fuels and the Investment Committee’s own environmental, social and governance guidelines, there was broad agreement among trustees not to make new fossil fuel investments and to wind down current investments in this sector as quickly as possible while minimizing the negative impact to the value of the endowment," Michael S. Roth, the university's president, and Donna Morea, chair of the Board of Trustees, announced Thursday in a written campus update. "The University will be divested from direct fossil fuel investments by the end of the decade."
They said Wesleyan has already committed to aiming for carbon neutrality "and will now be accelerating work in this direction." They also noted that the board also recently authorized "the first phase of converting our energy infrastructure from steam to hot water. When complete, this project will reduce our carbon footprint" by thousands of metric tons per year.
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