A group of Tufts' students have joined a national campus movement to urge universities to divest their endowments from fossil fuels.

The students, part of Tufts Divest for our Future, met for the first time Thursday with the Investment Committee of Tufts University's Board of Trustees to discuss divesting.

The national campaign, spearheaded by 350.org, a climate advocacy group, began last September to ask universities to divest from oil, coal, and gas corporations that own the majority of the world's carbon reserves. Emissions from producing energy from those reserves trap heat in the atmosphere, warming the earth.

The Board of Trustees at Unity College in Maine became the first college in the nation in November to divest its endowment from fossil fuel industries. Students at Hampshire College and Harvard are also pursuing divestment, with 72 percent of voting students at Harvard urging divestment in November, according to the college's Undergraduate Council. Local groups such as The Better Future Project, a climate advocacy organization, are aiding in the growing movement.

A University of New Hampshire student group, meanwhile, is holding an educational forum on responsible investing Thursday, and many other New England college students are joining the movement.

Still, it's a big challenge: Fossil fuel companies are highly profitable and most endowments invest in oil giants including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell, which raked in $100 billion in profits in 2011 alone. Persuading money managers to miss out on those kinds of returns will be much harder than it was to get universities to drop their much smaller investments in South Africa to pressure that nation to end its apartheid policies.