10th Anniversary of the RBF's Divestment from Fossil Fuels

Today, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund celebrates the tenth anniversary of our decision to divest from fossil fuels, announced September 22, 2014, on the eve of the historic People’s Climate March in New York.

By then, the RBF had been making grants to address climate change for nearly 30 years and had begun to confront the moral tension between funding solutions to global warming and investing in fossil fuel companies. We realized that by divesting from fossil fuel companies and encouraging others to do the same, the RBF could help chip away at the powerful oil and gas industry that obstructed sustainable policies and solutions advocated by our grantees.

An analysis by Carbon Tracker also showed us that fossil fuel companies were overvalued due to unburnable carbon reserves already on the energy producers’ books, known as “stranded assets.” Divestment could be a prudent financial move for the RBF to preserve the value of our endowment for future generations. 

To help prove that investors could pursue climate and financial impact simultaneously, we committed to sharing our results with the public.

Since 2014, the RBF has reduced its total fossil fuel exposure to less than 0.2 percent of the endowment, down from 6.6 percent ten years ago. We have also extended our efforts to understand and mitigate how our financial holdings might contribute to climate-warming emissions by conducting an extensive assessment of our endowment’s carbon footprint and developing a long-term plan to decarbonize our financial portfolio.

The RBF endowment grew from $858 million to $1.3 billion over the same period. Although this includes a $250 million bequest from David Rockefeller, it also reflects approximately $100 million in special draws on the endowment and a doubling of our regular annual grantmaking. In 2022, the board of trustees adopted an ambitious plan to spend an additional $100 million over the next ten years for grants to address the climate crisis, including for efforts to challenge fossil fuel financing and advocate for new investment in the clean energy transition.

The RBF has shared these results, as well as the successes and setbacks that produced them, through regular reports, industry events, and individual engagements with institutional investors to help others navigate the challenges and rewards of divestment from fossil fuels. Today, 1638 organizations—a nearly tenfold increase since 2014— have committed to divest, including early holdouts like Harvard and the Ford Foundation.

The finance sector has evolved alongside the divestment movement, making it easier for investors to quit fossil fuels. Five years after the RBF announced it would divest, Hugh Lawson, former chair of the RBF investment committee and former partner at Goldman Sachs, observed, “At first, several managers would not agree to a fossil fuel free option for the RBF. But an increasing number of fund managers are now offering these opportunities.”

A five-year review of the Fund’s divestment progress highlighted that our overall financial performance beat market benchmarks with an average annual net return of 7.76 percent. As we gather financial results for 2024, we will have ten years of fossil fuel free investment data—enough to constitute an investing track record. A detailed and thorough examination of this data will help us identify and share transferable learnings as a resource to other investors.

The developments over the last decade provide evidence of progress and illuminate opportunities to use capital markets to accelerate climate solutions. “Divestment alone is not going to solve the climate crisis—that’s a legitimate point,” said Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the Wallace Global Fund, who helped launch the divestment movement. “But it is a necessary and effective step—and absolutely essential for building a movement that can take on a rogue industry.”