The year in review
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Active in the global RI community
Taking active part in the industry wide discussion around responsible investment and promoting best practices across the investment community are key components to our ESG work.
Annual ESG survey Our annual ESG survey highlighted to us that there is great investor appetite for sustainable investment products in the European markets, but that advisers’ ability to sell them may be held back by a lack of knowledge. We have therefore developed a series of three training presentations suitable for distributors and advisers about ESG and the implications of the regulatory changes in Europe, and have now started to offer this to clients. We are currently updating our ESG e-learning to include the relevant regulatory aspects and we expect this to be available in the first part of 2022. Academic collaboration During 2021, our ESG experts have been contributing to the Copenhagen Business School lectures for students with a minor in ESG by sharing their knowhow and educating the students. Our head of Responsible Investments, Eric Pedersen, sits in the advisory board of the Boston University Impact Measurement & Allocation Program. We believe that this collaboration and IMAP’s research can create positive change in how ESG data can be utilized by asset managers and other investors. Collaborative engagements We believe that joining forces with other investors in engaging with companies is a great tool that enforces the message we wish to bring. While we engage also individually, collaborative engagements are an important part of our active ownership work. This allows us to share views with other industry play- ers, and scale up the impact of our engagements. In 2021, we participated in 724 collaborative engagements, leading 77 of those. The most common collaborations were related to SASB, Climate Action 100+ and the Corporate Human Rights Bench- mark, besides our own Vung Ang 2 initiative and the Investor Policy Dialogue on Deforestation, in which we also play a lead- ing role.
Participating in investor initiatives is one way for us to share our knowledge as well as to develop and benchmark our own ESG approach and framework. During 2021, we were active in 36 investor initiatives across several ESG topics as well as in several Sustainable Investment Forums (SIFs) around Europe, and we participated in numerous engagements in collabora- tion with other investors. While these initiatives and collaborative actions are extremely important part of our work, we see that our role and respon- sibility in the RI community goes beyond these initiatives. We wish to engage with our stakeholders, in order to educate them as well as to receive valuable feedback and information. We do this by participating in events and discussions, contrib- uting to publications, engaging with our clients, and through academic collaboration. Below we share some of the highlights and examples of our actions in the Responsible Investment community. EFPA Luxembourg, Green Ethica publication As a recognised leader in Active Ownership, we were honoured to contribute to the EFPA Luxembourg’s 1 st edition of Green Ethica publication with two chapters taking a view on impor- tance of active ownership and especially engagement activi- ties. The publication was a result of a cooperation of more than 50 co-authors and more than 30 corporates, aiming to share the best practices and insights to Green Finance. SASB Integration Insight At NAM, the SASB Materiality Map is an important founda- tion of both our proprietary ESG scoring and our engagement process. However, the case study about our engagement with Samsung SDI, illustrates how important it is for users of SASB Standards and the SASB Materiality Map to combine the comparable industry-based aspects of the Map with their own knowledge of company-specifics. The case study has been published here.
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