There’s an old joke where a tourist asks a local how to get to a scenic landmark. “Well, I wouldn’t start from here,” the resident tells the traveller. Asset managers face a similar challenge when it comes to meeting their climate responsibilities. They’re starting from a sub-optimal place. But I’m optimistic that the data they rely on can improve dramatically, providing a more informed environment in which to make investment decisions without straying into greenwashing.
I sympathise with fund managers, whose role as society’s chief allocators of capital has pushed them to the forefront of the ESG debate. They face an incredibly tricky task when trying to assay the non-financial credentials of the companies they invest in. A landmark study published two years ago showed a sufficiently wide divergence in the ESG ratings applied by six different providers as to render them almost useless. The authors dubbed the problem “Aggregate Confusion.
The asset management industry recognises it needs better information. More than 100 investment firms with a combined $40-trillion of assets have signed up to a project called the Transition Pathway Initiative, which aims to scrutinise the climate change plans of 10,000 companies and make its results freely available. The backers include BlackRock, the world’s biggest money manager with $9.6-trillion, Legal and General Group’s fund arm with $1.8-trillion, and Abrdn which oversees $734bn.
More than 2,600 organisations support the global Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures , with more than 1,000 joining in the past year. The TCFD, which aims to standardise the metrics that companies provide on their environmental impact, said in its annual report earlier this month that more than half of the 1,650 firms it surveyed now disclose climate-related risks to their businesses.
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