UN Climate Change News, 3 July 2018 - Ahead of the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco in September, co-chaired by the UN’s top climate change official Patricia Espinosa, investors have scaled up engagement with systemically important greenhouse gas emitters, while expanding their focus list of companies.

Investor signatories to Climate Action 100+ initiative have added 61 companies that have significant opportunities to drive the clean energy transition and help achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate action. The key goals are to limit the global average temperature to as close as possible to 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to avoid the worst climate change impacts, including sever heatwaves, drought and storms.

“As institutional investors and consistent with our fiduciary duty to our beneficiaries, we will work with the companies in which we invest to ensure that they are minimising and disclosing the risks and maximizing the opportunities presented by climate change and climate policy,” investor representatives from AustralianSuper, California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), HSBC Global Asset Management, Ircantec and Manulife Asset Management, who have helped to lead the design and development of Climate Action 100+, wrote.

The initiative is designed to implement the investor commitment first set out in the Global Investor Statement on Climate Change in the months leading up to the adoption of the historic Paris Agreement in 2015.

Launched in December 2017 at the One Planet Summit, Climate Action 100+ garnered worldwide attention as it was highlighted as one of 12 key global initiatives to tackle climate change, and to date, 289 investors with nearly USD $30 trillion in assets under management have signed on to the initiative.

In July 2018, Climate Action 100+ released an update that showed more investors are mobilising across 29 countries to drive corporate action on climate change, and companies on the initiative’s focus list, have started to make progress towards its goals, including a trebling in support for the recommendations of the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures.

Climate Action 100+ is coordinated by five partner organisations: Asia Investor Group on Climate Change (AIGCC); Ceres; Investor Group on Climate Change (IGCC); Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC); and Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI). It builds on the successful investor engagement programmes coordinated by the partner organisations over a number of years.

Read the relevant Climate Action 100+ press release here and the GCAS news article here.