ERAFP wins jury’s prize in climate reporting awards

French pension fund ERAFP was awarded the jury’s prize in the third edition of international climate reporting awards run by the French government and think tank 2° Investing Initiative. 

The awards aim to recognise financial institutions that integrate climate-related considerations into their reporting and business practices. The intention is also to promote recent advances and leading practices in climate reporting.

An announcement about the award winners said ERAFP “distinguished itself for the quality of its climate reporting, particularly given its status as a relatively small entity in comparison with other candidates”.

ERAFP was one of the first investors to quantify the greenhouse gas emissions associated with its investments, initially for listed equities, and to compare them with a standard market benchmark. In July last year, it enhanced its climate-related disclosures by publishing the “temperature” of its portfolio by sector and by asset class in its public report, which follows the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Disclosures (TCFD) and France’s Article 173.

The “implied temperature rise” metric is a focus of a consultation on forward-looking metrics launched by the TCFD yesterday.

AXA won in the asset owners category of the International Climate Reporting Awards, Federated Hermes won the competition for asset managers, and Barclays won in the banks category. 

The awards were announced during a virtual prize ceremony that took place on Monday as part of “Paris for Tomorrow” week, an initiative intended to promote and improve sustainable finance activity by organisations in the Paris financial centre.

Other announcements made in connection with the initiative include the launch of the “Sustainable Finance Observatory,” a portal intended to facilitate the monitoring of commitments and data around the alignment of portfolios with carbon neutrality objectives.

The French government also announced that from January 2021 it would no longer grant an export guarantee for extra-heavy oil and unconventional hydrocarbon projects.

For this year’s edition of the International Climate Reporting Awards, the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, a jury member in 2019, as well as the Global Reporting Initiative, were added to the awards steering committee to provide their experience on the materiality and impact of sustainability-related matters to financial institutions.

The awards criteria and scoring system were updated to take into account the latest advances in climate reporting, such as how institutions perform climate stress-testing. 

The awards are organised by the French Ministry for the Ecological and Inclusive Transition and the French Ecological Transition Agency, together with 2° Investing Initiative.