GRAY MAGUIRE: JSE owes it to investors to step up ESG risk report
Service provider FTSE Russell is only providing a rudimentary assessment of companies
In the last week of January BlackRock CEO Larry Fink released his annual “letter to CEOs”. I was expecting the letter to focus heavily on the Covid-19 response, so I was surprised to find that the pandemic was mentioned only in passing, while climate change took up the bulk of the letter. Fink confessed to being pretty surprised himself, as he had flagged climate risk as a major concern in his 2020 letter but then expected the Covid crises to divert finance sector attention to health and the economy.
In fact, quite the opposite took place. The reallocation of capital away from fossil fuel-heavy funds accelerated even faster than he had expected. He noted that “from January through November 2020, investors in mutual funds and ETFs [exchange traded funds] invested $288bn globally in sustainable assets, a 96% increase over the whole of 2019”...
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