Thanks to our friends at Catholic Investment Services for hosting a terrific panel this past week on the topic of governance and investment performance! https://lnkd.in/ekiQass #governance #catholic #esg #endowments #Baird #foundations #investing #Marquette #Catholicinvestmentservices
Here Are America’s Top Methane Emitters. Some Will Surprise You. (NYT)
This article demonstrates the urgency to expand a regime of disclosure beyond public companies. In the absence of such measures, we are in effect “pushing the problem around” instead of addressing it.
Oil and gas giants are selling off their most-polluting operations to small private companies. Most manage to escape public scrutiny.
Johan Rockström: ‘We need bankers as well as activists… we have 10 years to cut emissions by half’ (The Guardian)
The eminent Earth scientist argues that we cannot just wait for the world order to change when it comes to tackling the climate crisis – we all have a duty to act now.
What makes a person like me most enthusiastic is that we are finally understanding that landing the Paris agreement is not just about eradicating fossil fuels, but about remaining within planetary boundaries. We need to keep carbon sinks in nature intact. We need to take care of the nitrogen, water and phosphorus cycles. Cop26 in Glasgow should be the first major climate conference where the climate agenda and the nature agenda come together. Let’s see if that succeeds but many forces are trying to push it to that point.
Interesting developments this week around Climate Change (NYT and BBC)
First, an activist hedge fund has successfully waged a proxy contest to elect climate activists to Exxon’s board. We have long said that despite hedge funds’ typically “short-termist” orientation, that skills in investor activism could be applied in a constructive way to sustainability.
For the first time a court of justice has ordered emissions reductions; a Dutch court ordered Royal Dutch Shell to reduce emissions by 2030, 45% below 2019 levels.
ESG Disclosure Standards for Investment Products
https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/ethics-standards/codes/esg-standards
Yesterday CFA Institute published the exposure draft of the ESG Disclosure Standards for Investment Products. This is a significant milestone on a mission-driven path to establishing global disclosure requirements for investment products with ESG-related features.
May 22 Updates
Biden issues executive order on climate:
And drought in California and the West:
Treasury Secretary Yellen Endorses TCFD Reporting, IFRS Sustainability Standards Initiative (ESG Today)
Does Good Governance Lead to Better Investment Performance? (Commonfund)
The governance framework of an institution plays a significant role in its overall success. Based on our work with hundreds of higher education institutions over the past 50 years, we believe that good governance is critical to the health of the institution and the positive performance of the endowment. Most people intuitively agree that “good” governance is imperative but currently there is a dearth of quantitative research available that defines and measures the difference that it can make. To rectify this and help to move the industry forward, Commonfund Institute is embarking on a new research project titled, The Commonfund-FGA Benchmarking Study of Governance in Higher Education.
The Study is the first of its kind and is being done in conjunction with Chris Merker and Fund Governance Analytics (FGA). FGA is a pioneer in the field of empirical governance research and evaluation of asset owners and operates in partnership with Marquette University. Their governance diagnostics are derived from decades of research and evaluation and have been used extensively to analyze the governance practices of public pension funds. This is the first time that these tools will be applied to higher education endowments.
Happy Earth Day!
No 2030 or 2040 pledges today, just a poem for reflection on this 52nd Earth Day.
Life is the simple thing we neglect every day. A day contains the time as we travel on our way. Time is the thing we lack in our lives. As we yearn to find our way through this phenomenon called life. We grow old in wisdom, yet are fragile in youth. We cannot escape the perils that seeks us with each move. We can embrace the seconds that the clock has, Or be the pawn forced by the master’s perilous hand.
– walkinverse (1/3)
Carbon Capture is Key to Companies’ Net Zero Pledges (WSJ)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/carbon-capture-is-key-to-companies-net-zero-pledges-11615975780
Many companies’ plans to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions to “net zero” rely heavily on technologies to capture carbon. Some are more speculative than others.
Nearly 1,400 companies have promised to cut their net carbon dioxide emissions to zero over the coming decades. So-called carbon offsets, where the gas is removed from the atmosphere, are central to many of these plans. The latest of the almost daily announcements: French oil giant Total said on Tuesday that it will plant a 40,000-hectare forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo to sequester 10 million tons of CO2 over 20 years.