Faith Ward highlights importance of setting right climate commitments in Portfolio Institutional interview and ICGN panel

Faith Ward, Chief RI Officer at Brunel, laid out Brunel’s Net Zero commitments in a wide-ranging interview with Andrew Holt, editor of Portfolio Institutional.

The interview also explored how best to engage with asset managers on climate.

“Asset managers can often have timelines and mandates that are constructed in a way that are different to the pension funds the mandates are there to serve,” Faith told Andrew Holt. “We try to bridge that by setting our expectations when we have a mandate.”

Faith expanded on the theme of engaging with managers at the ICGN Global Stewardship Forum in London (see image), in a panel titled: Assessing the Credibility of Climate Commitments. Faith was a panellist alongside Enrico Colombo, Senior Director of Stewardship, Nuveen, UK, and Courteney Keatinge, Senior Director of ESG Research, Glass Lewis, USA.

Amid all the targets, Faith noted that it’s important to understand “what is reality today.”

Later in the conference, Vaishnavi Ravishankar, Head of Stewardship at Brunel, sat on a panel titled: Asset Owners’ Expectations on Stewardship Reporting. Fellow panellists were Michael Herskovich, Global Head of Stewardship, BNP Paribas, France, and Valeria Piani, Head of Stewardship, Phoenix, UK.

Vaish highlighted the value of a systemic approach from asset managers, although also stressed that engagement progress often isn’t linear.

For more on the above, see:

Interview with Portfolio Institutional: https://www.portfolio-institutional.co.uk/interviews/brunels-faith-ward-recognising-that-you-cannot-save-the-world-is-important/

ICGN Global Stewardship Conference agenda: https://www.icgn.org/icgn-2024-global-stewardship-forum