January 2021

14Jan

How climate change is ruining retirement across the US

Jay Gamel, 76, still talks about his Northern California home in the present tense, as if nothing had happened. “The place is a paradise by any measure,” says Gamel, who is semiretired. “The mountains are beautiful, the surroundings are gorgeous. It’s a postcard.” For 26 years, Gamel had lived in — no, reveled in — his little redwood cabin in the Sonoma County town of Kenwood, where he edits a twice-monthly local newspaper. Gamel, who moved there from Chicago,...

January 14, 2021
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December 2020

15Dec

Divest or direct? Pension funds weigh their options in the climate crisis

n March 2017, Waltham Forest Council in London held £53.4m in investments in coal, oil and gas through its pension fund. Each of the 16,500 current and former workers who were members of the council’s pension scheme had more than £3,000 invested in fossil fuels. But this was about to change: the previous year, the council had become the first local authority in the UK to announce the divestment of fossil fuel holdings from its pension funds. Divestment can...

December 15, 2020
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10Dec

New York’s $226 Billion Pension Fund Is Dropping Fossil Fuel Stocks

New York State’s pension fund, one of the world’s largest and most influential investors, will drop many of its fossil fuel stocks in the next five years and sell its shares in other companies that contribute to global warming by 2040, the state comptroller said on Wednesday. Read also Exxon Under Pressure From New Activist Fund With $226 billion in assets, New York’s fund wields clout with other retirement funds and its decision to divest from fossil fuels could accelerate...

December 10, 2020
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07Dec

Exxon Under Pressure From New Activist Fund

Exxon Mobil Corp. is facing the threat of a proxy fight from a newcomer activist investor with a sustainability bent that wants the beleaguered energy giant to act faster to remake itself. Engine No. 1 LLC, an investment firm launched by Chris James last week, is preparing to send a letter to Exxon ’s board urging the Irving, Texas-based company to focus more on investments in clean energy while cutting costs elsewhere to preserve its dividend. The letter, a...

December 7, 2020
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04Dec

EIOPA launches discussion paper on a methodology for integrating climate change in the standard formula

Today, the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) published a discussion paper on a methodology for the potential inclusion of climate change in the Solvency II standard formula when calculating natural catastrophe underwriting risk. This discussion paper is a follow-up to EIOPA’s Opinion on Sustainability within Solvency II issued in September last year, which concluded that there is a need to consider if and how climate change-related perils could be better captured in the Solvency II framework...

December 4, 2020
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November 2020

19Nov

Canada. More firms disclosing climate-related risks, strategies: report

Within the last three years, Canada’s financial firms have increasingly begun providing insight on their material climate-related risks and goals in alignment with recommendations from the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), A new study from the Global Risk Institute in Financial Services (GRI) said there’s been a 40% increase in the number of companies that provide TCFD-related disclosure and information. There are now 25 firms, include big banks and pension funds, that follow TCFD recommendations, compared to...

November 19, 2020
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17Nov

Here Are the World’s Biggest Asset Owners

The top 100 asset owners controlled $20.1 trillion in global assets at the end of 2019 — a 6 percent jump from the year before, according to a new annual ranking. In its annual Top 100 Asset Owners study, published Monday, consultant Willis Towers Watson’s Thinking Ahead Institute reported that by itself, Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund weighs in at nearly $1.6 trillion in assets. That fund, the government pension system of Norway, and China’s sovereign wealth fund...

November 17, 2020
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17Nov

Canada public pension managers questioned on U.S. fossil fuel investments

Public-sector pension plan managers in Canada are being asked to explain their investments in an energy company building a new fossil fuel facility on the West Coast. The US$310-million liquefied natural gas facility, called Tacoma LNG, is being built at the Port of Tacoma by Puget Sound Energy (PSE), a utility in the state of Washington, and is expected to be completed next year. Proponents of the facility, like the utility, the port and a union working on the...

November 17, 2020
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12Nov

Defining Climate-Aligned Investment: An Analysis of Sustainable Finance Taxonomy Development

By Aneil Tripathy, Lionel Mok, Katie House The green bond market has grown rapidly since its inception in 2007. Climate-aligned standards provide investors with the confidence that their investments deliver a measurable climate benefit. Serving as a benchmark, these standards demonstrate alignment with the Paris Agreement, against which green bond issuers can then report compliance. This paper draws on the authors’ experiences as practitioners and researchers helping to develop the Climate Bonds Standard and the European Union’s Sustainable Finance...

November 12, 2020
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12Nov

US. California’s state pension fund pushes companies to cut their carbon pollution

Almost 2 million Californians receive a pension from CalPERS, the California Public Employees Retirement System. “Because we’re a pension fund, we rely on companies thriving in the economy to generate the returns, and we pay pensions out of that,” says Anne Simpson of CalPERS. She says climate change may put those investments at risk because extreme weather can hurt company profits. And if governments require cuts to carbon pollution, companies reliant on fossil fuels may lose money. “We need...

November 12, 2020
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