How Australia’s huge superannuation funds can do much more to fight climate change, with a little help
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2024
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The Conversation
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The Conversation AU
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Melbourne Law School
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Dibley, A. (2024). How Australia’s huge superannuation funds can do much more to fight climate change, with a little help. The Conversation AU.
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Few of us pay much attention to our superannuation. Under the Superannuation Guarantee, employers pay at least 11% of salaries into their employees’ super funds without workers having to do anything.
These accumulating automatic payments have turned the Australian super fund industry into one of the world’s largest, and the fastest-growing. Worth $A3.5 trillion, our superfunds sit alongside funds from Canada, Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and United States to make up 92% of total global pension assets.
But none of these funds are investing enough in the net zero transition. Institutional investors, of which super funds are a vital part, provided less than 1% of all direct private climate change finance globally in 2021/2022- a contribution of around $US6 billion. This is far from the trillions needed every year to finance renewable energy projects, cleaner industrial processes, and replacing fossil fuels in transport, among other initiatives.
At the same time, many Australian funds continue to invest in carbon-producing companies, such as oil and gas, even when they claim to be making “green” investments.
This article outlines reforms the federal government could undertake to encourage super funds to tackle the climate crisis. This would help align the super system with its original purpose: to provide a better standard of living for the millions of us who will retire on a climate-damaged planet.