ESG

Events of the past two years have led to many changes. In the investment world, perhaps none is more apparent than a new level of activism by pension funds. Managers and investee companies beware. At a plenary session at last week’s PRI Digital Conference (October 18-21), ‘Fund Governance for the Next Generation’, representatives of three…

Definitional concerns surrounding ESG have waned in the past few years. They are now mostly about measurement and standards. But what about impact investing? It looks like the new battle ground. Driven largely by the growing power of climate action forces, rising during the pandemic to a tidal wave of consumer, political and investor might,…

While the weight of global retail investment flows has swung behind climate-related themes in the past two years, that is not the case in all countries. Take a large developing nation such as South Africa for example. Ninety One, the listed global fund manager with a range of asset strategies and a long pedigree in…

Investment consultants like JANA, Frontier, and Willis Towers Watson, are banding together to “drive real change” by confronting the “daunting” task of accomplishing a net zero transition. The Net Zero Investment Consultants Initiative (NZICI) will see consultants embed advice on the transition to net zero into their advisory work and support clients on developing policies…

Melbourne: ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) is one of the fastest growing trends ininvesting globally. It has become part of the funds management zeitgeist, aided, in part, by research pointing to betterperformance by fund managers that favour companies with good ESG policies and practices.The recent decision by the Trump administration to restrict the ability of…

With climate change being increasingly recognised as a systemic risk, the investment community is becoming more focused on supporting the transition to a net-zero-emissions economy and establishing sound transition plans.   The announcement by Cbus Super is the most recent example. Last month, the $54 billion building and construction industry superfund launched a new Climate Change…

Looking for hidden ESG gems: a new frontier for responsible investing with “improvers” The ongoing Covid-19 crisis is likely to bear long-term consequences on equity investing, reinforcing the ESG vs. traditional non-ESG equity divide, with the former enjoying large structural demand. Such trends emerge from the 2020 fund flows data available thus far, which show…

TikTok can be described as a social networking app, primarily used by millennials, to share and view amateur video content. The app is Chinese owned. Known as Douyin, owned by ByteDance. As of August 2020, TikTok, had surpassed 1 billion users worldwide in less than four years. How does it work? Users film videos of…

Most fund managers or asset owners you may question to about ESG have probably stated that they are a signatory of the UN PRI at the very beginning of the conversation. Most likely, this would be mentioned as evidence of their broader commitment to ESG investing.

Amongst the headline noise on virus affected financial conditions, it is surprising that ESG seems to have gained an even stronger foothold.

I recently returned from a research trip to China and was struck by how seriously environmental issues are now being taken by government and town planners. As China continues to develop, environmental issues are increasingly front and centre in what is described in the country as a “war” against pollution.

For fixed-income investors, understanding environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors – as they are financially material to performance – has proven to be critical in assessing an issuer’s fundamental quality.