400 investors register on climate action reporting platform

Institutional investors are being encouraged to use a new online platform to report climate action they are taking and make new commitments.

Nearly 400 investors with $32trn (€27.5trn) in assets under management between them have used The Investor Agenda, which was formally launched in San Francisco yesterday as part of the annual conference of the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) and a global climate summit.

Developed by seven organisations including the PRI and the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC), the initiative “seeks over time to reflect the full breadth and scale of global investor-led action on climate change”.

It also aims to stimulate greater action by “bringing together and helping drive participation in a broad range of global investor initiatives”.

To participate, investors must report the climate actions they have taken or plan to take in one or more of four “focus areas”: investment, corporate engagement, investor disclosure, and policy advocacy.

According to the launch announcement, 392 investors had specifically reported new information or committed to policy advocacy activity under The Investor Agenda.

Investors who were already involved in related corporate engagement initiatives, such as Climate Action 100+, are counted as active by The Investor Agenda, but are not included in the 392 figure.

Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said The Investor Agenda “offers a clear path to scale-up investor action”.

“It gives investors multiple opportunities to continue to demonstrate their willingness to become part of the transformation that will lead us to a more cleaner, greener, sustainable future for all.”

Peter Damgaard Jensen, CEO of DKK275bn (€37bn) Danish pension fund PKA and chair of the IIGCC, said the emergence of the platform reflected “the mounting urgency among the global investor community to address the greatest challenge of our time through measurable and transparent actions”.