Head of Environmental Finance, Trucost
For the first time, the main S&P DJI indices in Latin America have been analyzed by Trucost to reveal their exposure to a range of different carbon metrics that prudent investors may want to be aware of. A central element of the analysis is the estimated portion of earnings that could be lost if the…
India regained its status as the world’s fastest-growing major economy at the end of 2017, posting a growth in GDP of 7.2%. Its population of 1.3 billion is also growing fast, as the country added 15 million people last year. Although welcome in their own right, these growth rates raise significant problems for the natural…
Japan’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is a 26% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 from 2013 levels.1 To achieve this, the Japanese government has set carbon targets for all sectors backed up by a national carbon tax and Tokyo emissions trading scheme. In the first…
Recently, investment professionals have paid increasing attention to the impact of carbon-intensive businesses on financial returns. Stricter regulation and increased certainty of higher carbon pricing have made this a mainstream concern. S&P Global Ratings’ announcement of a green assessment of debt finance in September 2016 is one notable example of this trend. Water scarcity, as…
Water crises are the top societal global risk in terms of impact, according to The World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report 2016. There is of course no lack of water; the risk is around availability of fresh water which constitutes just 2.5% of the world’s water. This has broadly been the case for millennia –…
Emissions of carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gasses are often foremost in people’s minds when they consider environmental risk. This is understandable as, if we continue on our current path, we are set for four degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, compared with pre-industrial levels. Expected consequences include the flooding of coastal cities, irreversible…
Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would have to fall by about 60% by 2050 to limit the increase in average temperature to 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Over the last 40 years, CO2 emissions have mostly risen or remained flat, and fallen only following major economic crises. Add to this a global population that is…