News & Research

The list of sustainable investment (SI) frameworks guiding portfolio design is long and keeps growing. Rarely a day goes by without intense discussion of some or all of them, and their often-conflicting implications for fund design. The authors of this paper aim to contribute towards this intensifying debate by examining in detail (as of October 2021) the criteria used in the 12 most important European pieces of legislation, country-specific fund labels and other standards guiding SI product design.

For this paper Qontigo’s Sustainable Investment Team collaborated with Clarity AI’s research team to deep dive into the theory and practice of impact investment, define the gaps and propose the reconciliation methods between the two.

In this paper we review some of the most prominent forward-looking climate metrics (FLCMs) that are currently available to investors, including proprietary methodologies developed by dedicated providers.

Science-based emissions-reduction targets (SBTs) help verify that a company has embarked on a pathway to reduce its carbon footprint and get aligned with climate action efforts. The inclusion of SBTs in indices provides an efficient solution to investors wishing to adopt a responsible approach in the face of the global warming crisis.