Читать книгу ESG Investing For Dummies - Brendan Bradley - Страница 21

Many challenges face the environment, but the clear focus is on climate change and the move toward net-zero emissions by 2050. This means that all man-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must decline dramatically (need for decarbonization), and what we can’t stop emitting needs to be removed from the atmosphere through reduction measures. Thus, reducing the Earth’s net climate balance to zero and stabilizing global temperatures is a key goal. While there is an increasing focus on issues such as biodiversity and water management, from an investment point of view, the performance of the energy sector has been relatively poor in recent years, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated that trend due to lower GDP-related demand and investors continuing to exclude fossil fuel stocks from their portfolios.

While there was an expectation that the pandemic might divert focus away from climate change targets, it seems to have accelerated structural changes in the energy sector, which will present opportunities for policy reform and renewable energy. Meanwhile, new players will participate in the transition to the low-carbon economy because there is now a greater awareness of the risks and opportunities linked to proactively addressing climate issues. Starting in January 2021, with a supportive Democratic government in place in the United States continuing to back a major green deal in Europe to help fund the energy transition, and the COP26 (United Nations Climate Change Conference) taking place in Britain in 2021, the fight against global warming seems to be heating up!

Therefore, on one hand, you have the largest asset manager in the world, BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink, releasing a statement to other CEOs emphasizing that climate risk is investment risk, and there is a need for consistent and comparable data. On the other hand, there is expectation for a surge in clean energy policies and investment, putting the energy system on track to achieve the sustainable energy objectives in full, including those established in the Paris Agreement. However, the global energy companies’ transition to renewable energy will require a major investment of time and money, so monitoring their ESG credentials in the interim period is necessary. See Chapter 3 for more information on the environmental factor in ESG.