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Korea Investment Corporation latest annual Sustainable Investment report covers key areas of their activities, including:

• ESG Integration - ESG Integration, ESG Review and ESG Program
• Climate Change - Carbon Footprint, Climate Scenario Analysis and Risks 
• Stewardship Activities - Proxy Voting, Shareholder Engagement, and Voting Cases 
• Partnership 

"The PRI Awards 2024 are now open entries until 14 June 2024. The details below should provide all the information you require to plan a submission and submit your entry.

We will welcome all types of entries covering different activities and issues. If you have further questions, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.."

SABIC's latest Integrated Report covers key areas of their ESG activities, including:

• Environmental, Health, Safety & Security
• Climate change & resource efficiency
• Sourcing
• People & societal impact

Stora Enso's latest Annual Report covers Sustainability on pages 35-82, key areas covered include:

• Sustainability targets
• Climate change: emissions
• Sustainable forestry and biodiversity
• Circularity & Product stewardship 
• Materials, residuals, and waste 
• Energy & Water
• Employees, Safety, Human rights & Community
• Sustainable sourcing 

Terra Alpha's fourth Impact Report details its progress towards sustainability across:

• Portfolio - investment process and portfolio construction
• Corporate Engagement - engagement directly with portfolio companies including proxy voting, thematic campaigns across companies, and company specific interaction
• Thought Leadership - thought leadership and advocating with collaborative efforts on the policy front

The rise of AI & climate risks amplify existing water risks faced by thirsty data centres

CWR releases a new report, “China ICT running dry? The rise of AI & climate risks amplify existing water risks faced by thirsty data centres”. The report reveals 4.3mn data centre racks in China consume around 1.3bn m3 today but can rise to >3bn m3 by 2030. This will put pressure on already stressed water resources, especially as the rise of AI & chatbots could see water use surge by a shocking 20x.

For perspective, ~1.3bn m3 is 1.9x the water use for households & services in Tianjin, a city of 13.7mn people… but with data centre growth plus AI, this could explode to more than 500mn people!

Clearly, this doesn’t bode well for China ICT as it is already highly exposed to various water risks. Of the 4.3mn national data centre racks:

• 46% are located in regions as dry as the Middle East;
• At least 41% are located in regions that are highly prone to drought while at least 28% are in areas highly prone to floods + at least 1/5 are very prone to both;
• 56% are located in coastal regions vulnerable to storm surge & sea level rise; and
• >75% lie in 3 river basins – Yellow, Yangtze & Pearl = vulnerable to basin & regulatory risks.

The EV company keeps pushing its “next phase of growth” message, but it’s getting harder to look past a slump in vehicle sales and its unexciting lineup.

In case you didn’t know that Tesla Inc. is on the cusp of a new wave of growth, it is now slashing its workforce by more than one-in-ten. It’s all there in the memo.

Chief Executive Elon Musk informed the ranks this weekend that more than 14,000 of them — based on year-end 2023 figures — would be leaving the electric vehicle manufacturer forthwith. The announcement is one part regret, three parts optimism. The phrase “next phase of growth” appears up top and in the kicker, with a derivative of it somewhere in the middle, too. This is all quite normal corporate stuff: Companies doing big layoffs must emphasize the leaner, fitter organism that will emerge. But this is Tesla at an interesting moment in its development, so the context matters.

Threats to food security are rising globally as governments grapple with the fallout from fluctuating commodity prices amid a cost of living crisis and increased economic, geopolitical and environmental volatility, according to our latest research.

Our Food Security Index (FSI), which evaluates the availability, access and stability of food supplies in 186 countries, shows that 135 countries have seen an increase in risk since 2022-Q4, compared to 48 where the risk decreased. Only 13 countries fall within the low risk category of the latest edition of the FSI, the lowest number since the dataset launched in 2017.

Risks continue to run highest in parts of the developing world, with countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas most at risk. But the data – which also considers nutritional outcomes for each country’s population - highlights rising food insecurity even among rich nations, with Europe witnessing the largest increase in risk of any region. The likes of Australia, New Zealand and Canada have also seen an uptick.

The way investors assess firms has seen a radical change in the last several years. Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) aspects have become important indications of a company’s long-term health and resilience, surpassing traditional financial measurements. Corporate governance procedures, social responsibility, and environmental stewardship are just a few of the many topics covered by ESG.  

ESG disclosure scores are becoming more and more important in influencing investor perception and promoting financial success as investors grow to understand the value of sustainability and moral behaviour. In this blog, we will look into the ways in which businesses can use ESG activities to gain a competitive edge and sustain growth as we delve deeply into the complex interplay between investor perception, financial performance, and ESG disclosure scores. 

The European Union (EU)’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) aims to make corporate sustainability reporting more transparent, consistent, and standardized to help drive capital towards sustainable investment as part of the new Green Deal.

Companies subject to the CSRD will have to prepare a “sustainability statement” according to the new European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), with the first set of sector-agnostic standards having been adopted by the European Commission in July 2023. Sector-specific standards as well as standards for small- and medium-sized businesses and non-EU parent companies are still under development.

Additionally, specific implementation elements, such as filing deadlines and consequences of non-compliance, are still being finalized, as EU member states are in the process of transposing the directive’s requirements to national law by July 1, 2024.  by July 1, 2024.  

Analysis from Sustainable Fitch indicates that US corporates lag most international peers on corporate environmental disclosures, as reflected in broadly lower ratings achieved by US-based entities than mainly European peers. With the advent of the newly adopted Securities Exchange and Commission (SEC) climate rules, disclosure requirements for larger US-based companies increase.

Although the rules are already being broadly challenged, we view these findings as an important indicator of the overall preparedness, or in cases lack thereof, of US entities in complying with more robust disclosure requirements. These include similar requirements coming from the state of California’s recent climate disclosure bills, as well as from the EU’s reporting requirements for non-EU entities operating in the region.

Ninety One's latest report covers key areas including:

• Climate solutions and transition sleeves
• Optimising existing allocations for returns and impact
• Equities and credit, and sovereign allocations 
• Private markets

If you read this, another geopolitical event has triggered fears in financial markets. In this note, I provide a simple checklist to help investors make sense of the events from a fundamental perspective. Based on the evidence from dozens of empirical studies I provide a list of questions to answer and how to position portfolios in reaction to these answers.

A guide to help investors separate the signal from the noise

We live in a world where wars, civil strife, and geopolitical tensions have an increasing influence on markets. There are plenty of geopolitics consultants ready to help investors with advice and even more strategists who pretend to know how to play markets in a time of geopolitical tensions.

This survival guide is not specific to any particular crisis at hand but based on an analysis of the extensive empirical literature on the impact of wars, civil wars, terror acts, and similar events. 

We all know that if someone divests from a company, all they do is sell the shares to another investor who may care less about the environmental or social record of a company. But David Whyte from the Queen Mary University in London tracked what happened to the shares in BP and Shell that were sold by large investors divesting from these companies. And the results are sobering.

Whyte tracked the changes in shareholding of the 20 largest institutional investors in the two UK oil majors after the Paris Climate Accords in late 2015 until 2022. On average, he found that the largest institutions increased their shareholdings while smaller shareholders tended to divest. Most notably, the largest two to three shareholders, which tend to be Blackrock and Vanguard together with Norges Bank all increased their shareholdings in BP and Shell.