4 Youth Sue CPP Investments for Failing to Protect Pensions from Climate Risk

This story is part of a selection of our top news from 2025 that we’re republishing during the holiday break. We’ll be back to our regular schedule in the new year.

Originally posted: October 27, 2025

Four youth from across Canada are suing the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board for failing to protect their pensions from climate risk, in what the Board is interpreting as an attack on the pension plan itself.

Aliya Hirji or British Columbia, Travis Olson of Alberta, and Rav Singh and Chloe Tse of Ontario allege that CPPIB, also known as CPP Investments, “is breaching its legal duties by subjecting pension contributions to undue risk of loss from poorly managed climate risk,” Shift Action for Pension Wealth & Planet Health writes in a release this morning. They’re represented by lawyers from Ecojustice and Goldblatt Partners, LLP. Shift is not an applicant in the case.

The four youth and their lawyers filed their case in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice and served notice to CPPIB at 9 AM Monday.

The case does not seek financial compensation, Goldblatt partner Simon Archer told a media conference Monday morning. “Instead, we’re asking the court to provide guidance on the appropriate tools [for CPPIB] to use and the appropriate processes to follow to ensure that climate risks and impacts are taken properly into account.”

The lawsuit claims that CPPIB, responsible for safeguarding the retirement savings of more than 22 million Canadians, is drastically underestimating the risks to its investment portfolio due to climate change. Shift says it’s the first time a Canadian investor has faced legal action for mismanaging climate risks, and the world’s first against a pension fund investment manager “anchored in the duty of impartiality and even-handedness in a multi-generational context—in other words, the duty to act fairly towards young contributors who will retire after 2050 when climate-related financial risks will be even greater.”

After CPPIB abandoned its net-zero emissions commitment in May, “the filing also alleges that CPP Investments currently lacks adequate measures to manage climate-related financial risks, all while continuing to invest Canadians’ pension contributions in fossil fuels that worsen climate change,” Shift adds.

A CPP Investments spokesperson told The Energy Mix the fund “will address the matter through the courts, if necessary.”

“To be clear, an action against CPP Investments and its efforts to maintain the sustainability of the CPP, is an action against the retirement security of 22 million Canadians. We intend to do whatever is needed to uphold their interests,” Michel Leduc, the fund’s senior managing director, public affairs & communications, wrote in an email.

“We respect the right of Canadians to express their views on how the CPP Fund is managed,” he added. “Our focus remains on integrating climate-related considerations into our investment activities, all while remaining focused on disciplined, evidence-based investing and transparent reporting consistent with our mandate and Canadian law.”

CPP Investments has not answered a follow-up question asking how it’s an action against the retirement security of 22 million Canadians to ask CPPIB to accurately factor in climate risks that, according to climate science and multiple legal opinions, are a threat to those same beneficiaries’ retirement security. But Shift Executive Director Adam Scott said the four youth applicants “are of course part of the 22 million Canadians who make mandatory contributions to the Canada Pension Plan on every paycheque. Their interests are aligned with all Canadians who are counting on the CPP for their retirement, but are concerned about the impact of the climate crisis.”

Scott reiterated that the lawsuit does not seek monetary damages, but is “intended to ensure that CPP Investments does a better job of managing the long-term financial risks of climate.”

One panelist during Monday morning’s media conference cited at least one Canadian pension fund that has seen stronger financial returns after reducing its exposure to climate and fossil fuel risk.

The media conference included a statement from Archer, who said he has advised pension boards and trustees for more than 20 years. “It is now clearer than ever that climate change is a relevant factor that pension administrators must take into account when administering the plan and making investment decisions,” he told reporters. With legal opinions on the books that also date back a couple of decades, “climate issues are not a matter of convenience or political choice, but a matter of law when it comes to pension administration.”

Archer cited then-Bank of England governor Mark Carney’s now-famous Tragedy of the Horizon speech a decade ago, in which the future PM declared that “we don’t need an army of actuaries to tell us that the atmospheric impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors, imposing a cost on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentive to fix.”

Now, those future generations are speaking up, with the four youth “sounding the alarm for Canadians,” declared applicant Aliya Hirji. “If financial actors carry on with business as usual, the 3°C hothouse world of tomorrow will be bleak, and if you’re planning to retire after 2050 in that world, your pension might not be safe.”

Yet CPP investments is “using our mandatory pension contributions to fund fossil fuels and worsen the climate crisis,” she added. “One reason we’re on this path to runaway climate change is that our financial institutions are financing it.”

“We’re no longer okay with our money being used in unjust and risky ways,” Hirji said. “We’re asking the pension plan to get onboard now. We deserve better, we expect better, and other financial actors should take note.”

Applicant Travis OIson said his family has experienced the ups and downs of fossil fuel employment in his home province of Alberta, “but I know what’s coming will be much worse. The world we’re building is one where life gets more and more expensive. It’s a world where even diligent savers like myself are going to have to stretch our dollars to make ends meet.“

CPPIB’s investment choices “make me worry that a soft landing won’t be there when I need it,” he added, by “locking us into a future of ever-diminishing pension returns, whether our money gets sunk into stranded assets or the climate change we finance wreaks systemic havoc on all our investments.”

Yet the CPP is supposed to be “the cornerstone of Canada’s social safety net, meant to ensure the retirement security of current and future generations of Canadians,” Archer said. “Our clients are concerned and allege that CPP Investments is undermining the very retirement security of the young Canadians it is mandated to protect due to its poor management of climate risks.”

“Without action to curb fossil fuels, we are on track for a 3°C warming by the end of this century,” an outcome that would be “like experiencing the Great Depression forever,” said Ecojustice lawyer and sustainable finance lead Karine Peloffy. “By recklessly downplaying one of the greatest threats to the pensions’ long-term value, CPP Investments is effectively flying blind to the real risks of climate change and failing to protect the pensions of young Canadians who will retire after 2050.”