Still Waiting: HMC Endowment Climate Report Absent for Second Year in a Row

For students and faculty who spent nearly a decade pushing Harvard toward fossil fuel divestment, the annual Climate Report was the one concrete way to assess whether the University was trying to fulfill its promises. Now, with that report absent for a second consecutive year, members of the divestment movement—including student organization Sunrise Harvard and a founding member of Harvard Faculty for Divestment—say they’re left with no clear way to assess whether the University’s $56.9 billion endowment remains on track to meet its own climate commitments.

In April 2020, Harvard became the first U.S. university to commit to achieving net-zero endowment emissions by 2050. From 2021 to 2024, the Harvard Management Company published annual reports each February or March detailing its progress toward the goal. Since 2025, however, HMC has released no public climate reports.

In a statement to the “Harvard Independent,” HMC Communications Director Patrick McKiernan emphasized HMC’s dedication to net-zero. “HMC remains committed to achieving a net-zero portfolio by 2050, and we look forward to providing an update on our progress in due course,” McKiernan wrote.

The statement echoes one HMC sent to the “Crimson” over a year ago and again earlier this month.

Bill McKibben ’82, former “Crimson” president, founder of climate change organizations 350.org and Third Act, and a longtime advocate for divestment from Harvard’s endowment, was more pointed in a written statement to the “Harvard Independent.” “Turning in your assignments on time is not exactly an unheard-of task in academia. HMC has lots of money and staff; perhaps they need to talk with a tutor about their problem,” he wrote.

Many involved in the original push for fossil fuel divestment say the delay feels especially relevant given the current political climate. “We are experiencing devastating setbacks to climate progress as the Trump administration increasingly thwarts renewable energy projects and expands fossil fuels,” Sunrise Harvard co-lead Helen Mancini ’29 said. In the past two weeks alone, the Trump administration’s EPA has repealed rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions from coal and natural gas power plants; a federal judge also reinstated a $7 billion program to provide rooftop solar in low-income communities, rebuffing President Trump’s attempts to axe it.

“Harvard should be visibly fighting for the energy transition that they committed to in 2021, not brushing it under the rug,” Mancini continued. “Failing to release the annual Climate Report is a display of carelessness and capitulation. Not only that, Harvard owes it to the students and staff who spent years fighting for divestment to be transparent about the status of the endowment.” Sunrise Harvard, formerly Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard, was co-founded in 2012 by students including Chloe Maxmin ’15 and rose to prominence over the decade as the primary student organization toward climate-based endowment reform on campus.

Not everyone knows why HMC has not published. “I do not know why HMC has not issued, in 2025 and 2026, its annual Climate Report,” James Engell ’73, Gurney Professor of English Literature Emeritus and a founding member of Harvard Faculty for Divestment, wrote in an email to the “Harvard Independent.” “In previous years I read the reports and discussed them with HMC.”

Harvard Faculty for Divestment was created during the winter of 2013–14 with five initial members. By 2020, more than 1,000 Harvard-affiliated faculty had signed the petition to push the University toward fossil fuel divestment. Engell was one of those five. “The current federal administration has done much to block renewable energy and to promote fossil fuels. The president has called climate change a hoax,” he wrote.

Engell suggested that, by not publishing, Harvard may hope to avoid ruffling any more feathers with the Trump administration, but emphasized that this was merely an informed guess. In a similar vein, he stated that, as far as he was aware, the investment policy itself regarding climate issues had not changed.

He also highlighted that Harvard’s 2021 policy change went beyond simple divestment from fossil fuel corporations and instead called for complete decarbonization of the endowment by 2050 toward net-zero, in line with the goals of the UN and the IPCC. “In many ways this is a more ambitious and harder goal than divesting from a few hundred companies, whether they are held publicly or through private, pooled, or commingled funds,” Engell pointed out.

He added that meeting this goal has grown more difficult over time as companies themselves fall behind internal climate goals and global temperatures approach 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. “It makes it harder to meet a decarbonization or carbon neutral goal when fewer opportunities for such investment are available.”

The University of Michigan, for example, has continued to publish detailed updates on similar pledges. Committing to a net-zero investment portfolio in March 2021, the University reported in December 2024 that it had invested $420 million in sustainable energy over the previous two years and expected its endowment-related investments to offset more than half of its portfolio emissions by the end of the decade. The University of Michigan has continued to publish similar reports annually. Harvard has not released comparable figures since its 2024 report.

Still, Engell expressed optimism about the long-term trajectory of climate-conscious investing. “I have faith that over the course of the next few decades, the economic advantages and efficiencies of renewable energy, along with growing awareness of the negative economic, social, biodiversity, and health effects of climate change and extreme weather, will continue to direct investments away from commodities and activities that exacerbate climate change.”

Wren Horne-Sarkees ’29 (wrenhorne@college.harvard.edu) is comping the “Harvard Independent.”

An audio interview was also held with a Harvard undergraduate, but didn’t appear especially relevant following its conduction, and its transcript was not used to construct the article.