Climate change pushes investors to take their temperature
Policymakers are pushing investors to do more to ensure their portfolio choices help to meet the 2015 Paris Agreement to combat climate change by limiting planetary warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, and preferably to 1.5C.
A vanguard of insurers and pension funds, many of whom will be in Davos this week for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, say part of the answer is a new “temperature score” that gives a snapshot of how their investments are contributing to climate change.
A single score, they say, can help them navigate the reallocation of capital from heavily polluting sectors of the global economy likely to take a financial hit to greener companies poised to profit.
So far, the temperature metric has been adopted by only a handful of the thousands of financial institutions worldwide but the buzz it has generated shows how investors’ concerns about climate risk are finally moving into the mainstream.
“There’s still a massive amount of work to be done on this but it’s very encouraging that we as an industry are being forced to answer this temperature score question,” said Mark Lewis, head of sustainability research at BNP Paribas Asset Management.
Read more @Reuters
