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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]
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