Fortis Investments launches innovative Environmental Benefits Investment Approach

 

Fortis Investments have announced that its SRI (Sustainable and Responsible Investments) team has launched an innovative approach to quantifying environmental benefits in the management of environmental sustainability funds.

This new approach has been developed jointly by Fortis Investments and Trucost and builds on the increasing recognition that investors regard environmental impacts as costs.

Initiatives - such as the Carbon Disclosure Project, which is backed by investors with over USD31 trillion of assets under management - have promoted the need for environmental impacts to be expressed in financial terms, thereby enabling proper assessment of how companies are managing their environmental impacts. The Fortis Investments’ approach looks at environmental externalities from a different angle, focusing upon environmental benefits as generated by some companies and their impact.

An environmental benefit arises from an alternative technology that reduces the use of environmental services when compared to traditional technologies, thereby producing an environmental benefit equivalent to the costs avoided.

Fortis Investments uses Trucost methodology to identify these benefits and applies them to an investment portfolio. This methodology assigns a monetary cost to environmental damages and, thus, allows a comparison of all environmental impacts. This provides a better understanding of which impacts are most significant and which clean technologies provide the most environmental benefits.

This framework will be used to quantify and value the positive benefits of sustainable environmental technologies in the areas of clean energy, water and waste and will be applied to the Fortis L Fund Equity Environmental Sustainability World fund.

Investors in this fund will, thus, have a very clear idea of the funds real environmental profile.

This new approach is launched in tandem with an innovative environmental footprint calculator - Click Here - that helps individuals understand the impact their daily life has upon the environment. Individuals are invited to calculate their environmental footprint on-line - via a series of questions about their daily consumption patterns, to reduce their footprint by adopting recommended lifestyle changes and to counteract their residual footprint by investing in the fund.

This footprint calculator is believed to be the first calculator that can translate a household’s environmental impacts into economic terms.

For more details, contact -

Lynn J Pattinson
Fortis Investments
Tel: + 32 (0)2 274 84 66
E mail: [email protected]