Where theory and practice meet: Sustaining and impactful, and especially for governance fiduciaries.
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.
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.
Biden issues executive order on climate:
And drought in California and the West:
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.
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)
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.
Starting this week, Sky News will get deadly serious in its coverage of climate change by highlighting every night the time we have left until the planet overheats.
The figure is already less than 12 years, and the on-screen ticker will be counting down, second by second, as we head towards the ominous limit of 1.5°C hotter than when the Earth’s temperature was first comprehensively measured in 1880.
The figure is already less than 12 years, and the on-screen ticker will be counting down, second by second, as we head towards the ominous limit of 1.5°C hotter than when the Earth’s temperature was first comprehensively measured in 1880. That ceiling was set in Paris at COP21, the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference, and Sky News has made its bold statement as we approach COP26 in Glasgow in November.
Important announcement on global sustainability standards:
Given the growing and urgent demand, the intention would be for the Trustees to produce a definitive proposal (including a road map with timeline) by the end of September 2021, and possibly leading to an announcement on the establishment of a sustainability standards board at the meeting of the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26 in November 2021.