07 September 2016

IPE: Major European pension investors commit to UN development goals

A coalition of European investors, including the managers of more than €550 bn in Dutch pension assets, has made an explicit commitment to use the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the reference framework for an increasing amount of investments.

“Mounting social and environmental challenges underline the urgency for investing into a sustainable economy whose needs are codified by the United Nations in the SDGs for 2030,” the investors said in a statement unveiled today to coincide with a major conference of the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment in Singapore. “As institutional investors,” the statement continues, “it is essential to invest pension fund assets in these goals, and to do so at scale.” This will involve the investors “striving to facilitate a steep increase in what we call Sustainable Development Investments (SDIs)”.

According to the investor statement, SDIs are investments that meet two key criteria, namely that they make a positive social and/or environmental impact and yield market-rate financial returns.

They can be found, and will be pursued, in all asset classes.

With impact at the core of the investment approach, there is a strong emphasis on the measurement thereof.

“We distinguish between investments where impact has and those where it has not been measured, and stimulate the latter to report on measurable impact,” the investor statement reads.

The SDGs, of which there are 17, have been garnering an increasing amount of attention from the responsible investment community since they were adopted in September last year. Each of the 17 goals comes with specific targets – 169 in total – and indicators.

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