Investing in Green and Climate Strategies How to Achieve Climate and Net Zero Goals with Paris-Aligned Portfolio Strategies
- The climate-aware Paris-aligned framework, against which less than 1% of global assets are currently managed, adopts a multi-pronged, forward-looking approach to dealing with climate risks. We expect the approach to gain in popularity.
- In our historical analysis, risk was similar to the parent benchmark, leading to a low tracking error. Security selection, through the use of climate metrics, partly contributed to benchmark-relative returns.
- The strategies mitigated physical climate risks and transition risks while benefiting from green revenue opportunities.
Overview: Understanding Climate-Aware Investing
To start, it is important to highlight how climate-aware investing is different from ESG investing. ESG investing uses environmental, social and governance factors to evaluate companies on how sustainable they are along all three dimensions. Climate investing focuses on mitigating climate change and reaping opportunities.
For certain sectors, such as insurance writing, climate risks are tangible as any increase in the severity and frequency of natural disasters can adversely impact underwriting risks, especially in the property and casualty segments. Recognising the potentially huge costs associated with climate, the French central bank released the first results of its climate stress tests in 2021, which found that natural disaster-related insurance could rise up to five-fold in the country’s most affected regions.1
In this paper, we examine how investors can incorporate climate-aware indices into an investment portfolio from a strategic asset allocation standpoint. To this end, we examine how climate-aware indices, namely the MSCI Climate Paris Aligned index series, differ from their traditional market-value-weighted counterparts.
As a reminder, the MSCI Climate Paris Aligned indices seek to maintain diversified exposure to equities within a tight tracking error budget, while improving on their green credentials through reducing climate risks and pursuing opportunities as well as aligning with the Paris Climate Accord commitments.
Invest in a Climate-Conscious Manner
The world is increasingly acknowledging the dangers of climate change and grappling with the challenges of its consequences. This awareness is present in the investment community, where investors continue to allocate huge sums of money into climate investment funds.
According to Morningstar, assets in European climate funds doubled in 2021 to $325 billion.2 However, under 1% of global total assets have a temperature pathway that is aligned with the Paris Agreement, with the majority of the other assets aligned to over 2.75oC of global warming.3 Recognising the increasing importance that investors attach to climate change issues, 457 investors (representing more than $41 trillion in assets under management) recently signed the 2021 Global Investor Statement to Governments on the Climate Crisis, which urges governments to work with institutional investors to “raise ambition and accelerate action to tackle the climate crisis by reducing global net carbon emissions by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030.”4
Other initiatives undertaken by investors include the commitments made by some asset owners (for example, signatories to the Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance) to set targets to reduce emissions and increase allocation to climate solutions.
The rising investor focus on climate change issues and sustainable finance had existed for some years but was further bolstered by the European Commission’s launch of the Sustainable Finance Action Plan in 2018, which created standards for benchmarks that seek to address climate risks and avoid “greenwashing.” Two types of benchmarks, the EU Climate Transition Benchmark and the EU Paris-aligned Benchmark, were defined. The former is seen as a tool to facilitate the transition to a low-carbon economy while the latter, which is much more ambitious, seeks to favour companies with sustainable business models and serves as a tool for investors at the forefront of the climate transition.