Over the past five years, CFSGAM’s approach to responsible investment has focused on its investment processes and long-term risk adjusted financial returns. Pablo Berrutti, Head of Responsible Investment Asia Pacific, says, “We believe climate breakdown has diverse, urgent and complex implications for investors and the companies we invest in. However, the current approach to assessing climate risk is not comprehensive enough. Carbon footprinting doesn’t include important physical and transition risks. We have seen some funds promote a low carbon footprint despite holding assets in equally exposed sectors like pipelines or coal transport.”
In last year’s responsible investment report we described the need to “rethink performance”, and the challenges of moving away from the focus on backward looking, short-term, benchmark-relative returns. Organisational quality also includes forward looking, long-term, sustainability and societal outcomes.
To that end, we reported on client return objectives, company engagement, diversity and our approach to key issues like climate change and human rights. We used quantitative measures, described our focus areas and provided a significant number of case studies to demonstrate our ability to be reliable, consistent and excellent stewards of our clients’ assets both now and into the future.