To halt climate change, the 2015 Paris Agreement implicitly requires leaving fossil fuels underground (LFFU) and aligning financial flows with this goal. Taking this crucial step will inevitably strand huge amounts of fossil fuel resources and assets (worth $16-300 trillion), affecting big investors: fossil fuel firms, shareholders (pension funds/philanthropies), debt financers (aid agencies/development banks) and governments. Research regarding big investors, the implications of LFFU for developing countries with fossil fuel resources, and how LFFU can be equitably mobilized around the world, is scarce.
Hence, CLIFF addresses the question: What is the role of big investors in LFFU? What are LFFU’s North-South implications? And what measures can be taken by whom to equitably allocate and accelerate shareholder and stakeholder responsibility in energy transformation for inclusive development?
Limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels is crucial to avoid catastrophic damage to the Earth’s environmental systems, and requires phasing out fossil fuels. However, on the one hand, 1.5℃ is inadequate to protect lives and ecosystems and 1℃ is more just creating greater urgency; on the other hand, current behaviour is more consistent with a 2.7℃ future. As such, LFFU has high stakes, disputed values, and urgency. The extraction, refinement, and consumption of fossil fuels accounts for the vast majority of global emissions. To stay within safe earth systems boundaries and mitigate the extent to which just boundaries are breached, fossil fuel extraction, production, and consumption need to end. CLIFF’s research contributes directly to the advancement of this project: how to leave behind fossil fuels, so as to avoid immense global suffering. While there is increasing investment in renewable energy, this is more than inadequate to substitute for fossil fuel and fossil fuel vested interests are lobbying heavily to shift blame away and suggesting that new technologies will help address the problem.
CLIFF combines institutional analysis and a theory of change for inclusive development (ICID) using a transdisciplinary, comparative case study approach. It has 4 substantive work packages: (a) a research protocol; (b) case studies on fossil fuel firms; pension funds; philanthropic foundations; aid agencies/development banks; developing countries with new fossil fuels; (c) a geo-political analysis, and (d) an integrative analysis. CLIFF innovatively examines big investors and countries with new fossil fuel discoveries and growing vested interests in opposing climate policy implementation; and agents of change who address these vested interests (theory of change).
CLIFF is analysing the big actors and the changing North-South aspects, to assess how these actors can be convinced to cooperate in phasing out fossil fuels. It is developing several narratives that can possibly change the dominant discourse and empower agents of change to promote responsible action. An Interactive Atlas and a Stranded Asset Index is expected to provide the data to underscore these discourses. CLIFF is also on a road show sharing intermediate results with key stakeholders and at least increasing awareness if not action.
