Reuters – Nina Chestney, Bruce Wallace

PARIS (Reuters) – Poring over a Bangladeshi flood map as a London financial analyst 12 years ago, Mark Campanale had no idea the moment would spawn a financial concept powerful enough to rivet central bankers, anger oil moguls and fuel a grassroots movement to get investors to dump their fossil fuel holdings.

The map was in the prospectus of a British firm seeking to raise money to build a coal-fired power plant in Bangladesh. Not only was Campanale angry that a company would pump more carbon emissions into the air from a low-lying country vulnerable to climate change in the form of rising sea levels; he was also mystified that investors didn’t see the financial risks that went with it.

“I was offended that the markets weren’t picking up the risks, given what we knew about coal and climate change,” Campanale recalls. “I thought: ‘This is mad’.”

Read the full article on the Reuters website.