UK. NEST withdraws investment from low carbon laggards
NEST, the workplace pension scheme set up by the UK government, will today urge investment managers to push for higher environmental and corporate governance standards as it announces further progress against the green investment strategy deployed across its £2bn portfolio.
The National Employment Savings Trust (NEST), which provides 5.4 million UK workers with pensions under the government’s auto-enrolment scheme, revealed it has withdrawn £27.2m of investments in the past year from companies it said were not making sufficient progress towards the low carbon economy transition and therefore posed a risked to members’ returns.
The pension scheme instead ploughed the same sum into companies it said were positioned to benefit from the global low carbon economy transition, including renewables and clean tech firms such as PG&E, Iberdola, Vestas, and Siemens Gamesa, according to its 2016 responsible investment report, it follows NEST’s decision to move significant sums into Swiss finance giant UBS’s climate-aware fund earlier in February, since which time the pension fund said it has also progressed further in tackling climate change, excessive executive pay and boardroom diversity at the same time as driving better returns for its members.
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