USS invests in climate fund, Aegon’s ESG assets top £10bn

USS invests in climate fund

The defined benefit section of the £80.6bn Universities Superannuation Scheme has invested in TPG’s TPG Rise Climate Fund, a global impact fund that aims to grow commercially viable climate technologies. The pension scheme has invested an undisclosed sum in the $5.4bn (£3.9bn) first close of the climate fund. Other fund subscribers include the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board, the Saudi Public Investment Fund, Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board, the School Employees Retirement System of Ohio, the State of Michigan Retirement System and Washington State Investment Board. TPG’s Rise Climate launched earlier this year and is the dedicated climate investing strategy of the manager’s global impact investing platform. It invests across various assets, “from growth equity to value-added infrastructure, and focuses on five climate sub-sectors: clean energy, enabling solutions, decarbonized transport, greening industrials, and agriculture & natural solutions”, TPG stated. The investment fits into USS’s strategy to increase private market investment and ramp up its exposure to green investments.

This article originally appeared on MandateWire.com

Aegon’s ESG default assets surpass £10bn

The volume of Aegon’s workplace default fund assets transitioned to environmental, social and governance strategies has surpassed £10bn, as the pension provider continues on its journey towards net zero. The provider is now working with its asset management partners to agree the roadmap for moving the remaining default assets, it stated. At the start of the year, Aegon announced the goal of having its default fund funds net-zero by 2050, alongside an ambition to achieve a 50 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030. Aegon’s approach is to ensure that where changes are made to increase ESG allocations, “these are done in a way that manages exposure to climate risk within the existing fund objectives while maintaining the overall level of risk and return that the customer is expecting”, it stated.

Banks call for support of sustainable infrastructure label

The Sustainable Markets Initiatives Financial Services Task Force, a group of 12 banks, which includes HSBC, Macquarie, Bank of America, NatWest and JPMorgan, have written an open letter calling for support of a new sustainable infrastructure label. Created by the ‘FAST-Infra’ initiative (Finance to Accelerate the Sustainable Transition) — a new scheme designed to help to close the trillion-dollar sustainable infrastructure investment gap — the new label will be used globally to classify sustainable infrastructure projects. The goal is to attract investors to investments with a positive sustainable outcome, while also motivating “private and public sectors to design more projects with sustainability criteria at their core,” the letter read. The label, which is currently under consultation, will be aligned with existing taxonomies and standards and is designed to be complementary to existing reporting requirements, it added.