The financial industry has jumped on the impact investing and environmental, social or governance—or ESG—bandwagon. But Hiromichi Mizuno, the man who oversees $1.6 trillion in the world’s largest public pension fund, says true believers on Wall Street are still hard to find, so he is taking his own steps to push ESG and impact investing off the sidelines.

As chief investment officer of Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund, Mizuno requires his asset managers to integrate ESG into their investment analysis—among many changes he has brought to the pension fund since taking the helm in late 2014. But while Mizuno told Barron’s there is growing consensus that using ESG criteria can lower risk, he routinely gets pushback. Despite the recent hype around ESG and impact investing, he says most on Wall Street and in asset management aren’t actually doing it.

The common knock against ESG or impact investing, which is investing with the idea of creating social or environmental good as well as generating financial returns, is that it not only doesn’t enhance returns but actually sacrifices them. Mizuno says one of the issues may be the time frame. While ESG may not matter as much over a one-year return, he thinks it has a much clearer impact over the 25-year horizon he considers for the pension fund, when the future retiree may be grappling with the fallout from things such as climate change.

Mizuno has been working with multilateral institutions, including the World Bank and others, to determine how to allocate money in ways that can help meet the United Nations’ sustainable development goals by 2030. At a panel discussion on Thursday hosted by Global Business Coalition for Education, which advises business on social impact, Mizuno said a failure to achieve the sustainable development goals would create a “huge global risk” for future portfolios.

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