New York’s Giant Pension Fund Doubles Climate-Smart Investment

Friday, February 2, 2018

America’s third-largest public pension fund is ramping up its climate-savvy investments, New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli announced to global finance leaders on Wednesday.

The fund, a huge and influential investor, plans to double its stake to $4 billion in a portfolio of companies that disclose and seek to lower their emissions of global warming pollution.

“We’ve particularly been concerned about how we can address the issue of climate risk and benefit our portfolio,” DiNapoli said, speaking at the Investor Summit on Climate Risk, where money managers called for investors to face up to the risks of climate change and to accelerate action to fight global warming.

As the summit was underway at the United Nations on Wednesday, the UK Government’s Met Office published an ominous new five-year forecast that adds urgency to the investors’ climate concerns: Annual global temperatures could reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels within the next five years, the Met Office warned. The aim of the Paris climate agreement is to prevent warming from getting much beyond that level.

Photo courtesy of reynermedia.

Source: InsideClimate News (link opens in a new window)

Categories
Environment, Investing
Tags
climate change, climate finance, impact investing