ESG Spotlight: A roundup of the latest news on environmental, social and governance initiatives, with the Camden Pension Fund moving equity assets into lower carbon alternatives, and a group of institutional investors calling for consistency on corporates net-zero plans.
Camden Pension Fund invests in green assets
The London Borough of Camden Pension Fund has moved assets within two of its equity portfolios into lower-carbon alternatives with its incumbent managers Baillie Gifford and Legal & General Investment Management. Earlier this year, the London CIV launched its Global Alpha Growth Paris-aligned Fund run by Baillie Gifford. The Camden pension fund has now decided to transition its investment in the CIV’s Global Alpha Growth Fund, also run by Baillie Gifford, into this Paris-aligned fund. The target weighted average carbon intensity of the Paris-aligned fund is 50 per cent lower than the MSCI All Country World Index. The sub-fund excludes companies that generate more than 10 per cent of their revenues from the extraction of coal, oil and gas, and companies that generate more than 50 per cent of their revenue from services provided to coal, oil gas extraction and production.
This article originally appeared on MandateWire.com
Schemes call for consistency on corporates’ net-zero plans
A group of institutional investors, including the BT Pension Scheme and other UK pension funds, have called for the implementation of new corporate governance measures to ensure companies can be held to account in achieving net-zero emissions commitments. In the statement published by the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change on Friday, investors urged companies to disclose a net-zero transition plan, identify the director responsible for the plan and provide a means for investors to vote annually on progress against the plan. The IIGCC stated that the publication of investors’ expectations is intended to make new corporate governance standards on net-zero alignments mainstream, and that ”a clear precedent for wider adoption is already in place”. More than 10 companies — including Shell, Unilever, Nestle, Glencore, Iberdrola and Total Energies, among others — have already implemented measures outlined in the statement.
