In the aftermath of last week’s damning IPCC report, planet pictures and green shoots flooded the news. Among the catch brought by the tide, we found useful suggestions by the Stockholm School of Economics: five concrete measures for reducing carbon emissions. It is a welcome roundup of possible solutions currently debated by leading economists. Meanwhile, our Snap column is optimistic this week, looking at the success of an averted disaster. Can we learn from the avoided ozone-layer depletion to save the planet again? The talk of the week was, of course, Swedish steelmaker SSAB’s first delivery of fossil-free steel to Volvo. But how sustainable is that steel anyway?
While you were away on the beach, Johanna Lundgren Gestlöf of SPP found the time to pore over the impressive body of this summer’s new regulatory documents related to the EU Green Taxonomy and reflect upon their meaning and implications. We caught up with her in the wake of a webinar on the proposed taxonomy extensions organised by the EU Platform on Sustainable Finance, where she, alongside the Platform Rapporteur, Nancy Saich and Nadine Viel-Lamare sheds some welcome light on the proposal.
This week, Henrik Lundin, Chief Investment Officer of the IMAS Foundation, talked to us about the way the €12 billion fund integrates ESG into their investment process, the foundation’s recent targeted investment in the high-profile Northvolt project, as well as about the CIO’s take on sustainability. We also followed Senait Asgede as she just completed her first weeks at Neuberger Berman. She shared her motivations and her views on what makes for a good ESG offering, particularly in the Nordics.
Following the publication of its draft sustainable infrastructure label, FAST-Infra invites feedback from all stakeholders on the FAST-Infra Sustainable Infrastructure Label (SI Label) until Tuesday, August 31st, 2021. We talked to Christian Deseglise at HSBC and Robin Grenfell at Green Investment Group (a part of Macquarie) to find out more.
Elsewhere, Moody’s announced the acquisition of RMS, a provider of climate and natural disaster risk modelling and analytics. And according to a new report, Morningstar indices focusing on renewable energy, equity-income and low volatility strategies appear to display unexpectedly high levels of ESG risk.
