Across the world, individual and institutional investors seek attractive financial returns while helping to achieve a positive impact on the communities around them. With growing concerns over climate change and global warming, geopolitical instability and uncertainty in financial markets, this has become even more pressing. The growing awareness of and support for responsible investing has led to it becoming inherent to the investment processes of many institutional investors.
This 2016 European SRI Study bears out the sustained growth in SRI across different approaches. The data collected for this Study, at the end of 2015, allowed us to cover institutional and retail assets from 13 different European markets. The methodology was modified for some minor aspects, as a few simplifications were brought to the SRI questionnaire; but the taxonomy remains unchanged from 2012. Some of the main growth trends highlighted in this edition have built up consistently over the past years. However, it is worth noting a number of interesting shifts.
The G20 Green Finance Study Group (GFSG)’s work supports the G20’s strategic goal of strong, sustainable and balanced growth. The challenge is to scale up green financing, which, based on a number of studies, will require the deployment of tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decade. The GFSG was established to explore options for addressing this challenge. “Green finance” can be understood as financing of investments that provide environmental benefits in the broader context of environmentally sustainable development.
Renewable energy can now be offered as a cheap and infinite source of power for the first time in credible quantities thanks to clean tech. Electricity companies, therefore, no longer need to rely on dirty coal-fired power plants. As a company, Prysmain can potentially avoid 27.2 million tonnes of CO2 a year from less transmission loss using this new form of clean tech. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, this is the equivalent to the emissions produced by eight coal-fired power station in a year.
The power sectors of China and India together combine to be one of the most significant sources of emissions on the planet due to the use of thermal coal plants. Indeed relative to other sources of carbon the potential unneeded carbon generated by these sectors relative to a 2°C scenario is the most significant of any source. While in China coal consumption appears to have peaked already, in both China and India coal demand will still exceed IEA carbon budgets for thermal coal before 2050.
As You Sow, YourSRI.com team up to carbon footprint $11 trillion in funds utilizing data from South Pole Group and exposing carbon risk – available now at fossilfreefunds.org. A first-ever analysis of over $11 trillion in global mutual funds and ETFs shows that a large number of major fund families are, according to climate-finance advocate As You Sow, “carbon hypocrites” that preach the merits of low-carbon investing but actually have above-average carbon holdings.
myImpact Academy is proud to announce the winning of the Investment Innovation Benchmark Award. The internatiol expert jury consists purely of representatives of Asset Owners (AO) and research-active academics and elected myImpact Academy as one of the most innovative tools within the sustainable financial market.
This report, which is based on research conducted for us by a big four professional services firm, focusses on the booming green bond market and explores the diverse landscape of green definitions, standards, frameworks, and guidelines that are currently used in the market. It seeks to assess how the green bond market can help finance the transition towards a sustainable economy and make significant contributions to addressing the environmental challenges of our time.
In this report we assess developments in sustainability reporting instruments worldwide since the publication of the last Carrots & Sticks report in 2013. By ‘reporting instruments’ we mean any instrument, mandatory or voluntary, that requires or encourages organizations to report on their sustainability performance.
The AODP Global Climate 500 Index rates the world’s 500 biggest asset owners - pension funds, insurers, sovereign wealth funds, foundations and endowments – on their success at managing climate risk within their portfolios, based on direct disclosures and publicly available information. Asset owners are scored on three key capabilities: Engagement, Risk Management and Low-Carbon Investment. They are graded from AAA to D while those with no evidence of action are rated X.
