We are excited to launch 🚀 TORIIS.earth, an interactive database that visualizes the University of Illinois System’s investments in fossil fuel companies, detail its carbon impacts, and outlines what Divestment at University of Illinois means. The creation of TORIIS.earth is motivated by the fight for a sustainable and healthy future, the deep need of transparent educational resources, and the desire for accessible accountability resources regarding financial decisions of the UIS administration and their stakeholders. You can support TORIIS.earth and take action by signing đź“ť our Open Letter!
In addition to an open letter requesting University of Illinois divest from fossil fuels, TORIIS.earth hosts interactive visualizations detailing the prudence of divestment and hosts a one of a kind searchable data for U of I Systems corporate bond investments.
Investigating the University of Illinois System’s investments, TORIIS shows that in Fiscal Year, the system reported over $120 million worth of corporate debt held in 52 companies (about 12% of the operating pool corporate bond ownership) that profited from the extraction, refinement, or transportation of coal, petroleum, or natural gas. Furthermore, the total amount of corporate bonds held in the University of Illinois System’s operating pool is responsible for financing 86,000+ metric tons of C02 emissions (calculated as total carbon emissions). Of these emissions, 66,000+ metric tons of C02 come from companies that profit from the extraction, transportation, or combustion of coal, petroleum, or natural gas.
As per the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions Calculator, the negative environmental impact of University of Illinois System’s investments in fossil fuel companies is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions from 14,700+ gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for one year or 12,900+ homes’ electricity use for one year, and the positive environmental impact from institutional divestment is equivalent to the carbon emissions avoided by recycling over 2 million trash bags of waste or the carbon sequestered by over 1 million tree seedlings grown for 10 years.
TORIIS could not have been made without Students for Environmental Concerns at UIUC and H4I UIUC (Zora Zhang, Jocelyn Xu, Miranda Ma, Liza George, Daniel Moon, Anthony Cruz Macedo, Alex Masgras, Eesha Barua, Xiaofan Li, Amit Sawhney), with funding made possible by a grant from the Illinois Green Fund awarded by the University of Illinois Student Sustainability Committee. Connect with us at linktr.ee/toriis.earth!



Hi team! Thank you for the powerful investigation and data visualization, I truly learned a lot from them. I am also conducting my investigation of university investment for a course project, I wonder how you determine whether a company is a fossil fuel company. Are you following the list given by Fossil Free Found or do you have other criteria? I also wonder if the net asset refers to the asset endowment pool. Thank you for the reply in advance!
Hi Jenny, to determine if a company is a fossil fuel company or not, we check a given companies industry assigned by the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS). If the industry assigned is one of ‘Oil & Gas E&P’, ‘Oil & Gas Equipment & Services’, ‘Oil & Gas Integrated’, ‘Oil & Gas Midstream’, ‘Oil & Gas Refining & Marketing’, Other Industrial Metals & Mining’, ‘Utilities—Diversified’, ‘Utilities—Independent Power Producers’, ‘Utilities—Regulated Electric’, ‘Utilities—Regulated Gas’, we then label the company as a ‘fossil fuel company’. The code that defines our set of fossil fuel industries can be found at https://github.com/toriis-portal/toriis/blob/main/src/utils/constants.ts, and the code that assigns if a company is a fossil fuel company or not can be found at https://github.com/toriis-portal/toriis/blob/main/src/server/api/routers/company.ts.
When we refer to the net asset value of a given company, we are summing the fair market value as assigned by the University of Illinois Systems’ (UIS) annual report for each asset held by a particular company. Of course, we only look at UIS’ operating pool, so the net asset values we report are a lower bound.
If you have any more questions or would like to schedule a meeting to discuss our data in depth, please reach out to info at toriis dot earth.
-Gabriel