The move came just days after the University of Southampton reportedly joined the growing number of academic bodies announcing plans to reduce their exposure to carbon intensive assets and step up investment in green businesses.
The WWF/ANU report contends that Australia is well placed to make an orderly and low-cost transition to decarbonisation if the government can send clear and predictable policy and regulatory signals to the market, and resist special pleading from the owners of carbon intensive assets.
But this is now changing, with growing recognition that the financial system suffers from an array of market failures – short-termism, misaligned incentives, inadequate transparency and ill-defined responsibilities – which entrench the allocation of capital towards resource and carbon intensive assets.
These minimize the need for the most capital intensive assets of a fully decarbonized energy economy: low carbon power plants and batteries.
Here, attention is focusing on how to improve the sensitivity of the financial system's antennae to the risks of pollution intensive assets.
The deepest such change is the rise of intangible but talent-intensive assets.
But they say the Skilling team wanted to get out of capital-intensive assets as quickly as possible.
Constraints on capital mean that it is natural for banks to re-examine their ownership of illiquid, capital-intensive assets.
This is the process by which investment in carbon-intensive assets entrenches dependence on fossil fuels, commits economies to higher emissions, and makes emission-reducing policies and practices much harder to enact.
The campaign aims to get fossil fuel companies first to disclose the risks created by their dependence on carbon-intensive assets, and then, as Ceres puts it, "ensure they are using shareholder capital prudently" in a world that takes "the economic threat of climate change seriously".
The report is calling on investors and asset owners to ask themselves the extent to which they are exposed to carbon-intensive assets that could be left stranded, while also challenging regulators to introduce new rules that require fossil fuel firms to report on the potential carbon impacts of their reserves and put in place "stability measures" to cope with the bursting of any "carbon bubble".
