ESG

Now more than ever sustainability and ESG topics are coming to the forefront across the globe from a diverse group of stakeholders including employees, customers, suppliers, communities, investors and regulators. Driven in part by the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a focus on employee health & safety, supply chain resilience, and corporate culture, along with growing concerns on climate risk to reputation and the associated impact on corporate value creation.

Many institutional investors are facing their greatest challenges for many years. They are transforming their investment processes at high speed to reflect today’s imperatives, such as environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing, innovative technology, ever-shifting regulations and demands for greater transparency. Yet they must do this in a complex and unstable financial environment. I compare this challenge to changing the sails and masts of a ship as it is battered by a storm. For this report, we surveyed 200 asset owners (pension funds, insurers, sovereign wealth funds and endowments/foundations) owning assets of around $18 trillion. Reading it, I was struck by how the pandemic has further accelerated the shift to ESG. Asked for the top 3 trends that will affect their organization over the next three to five years, 62% cited either climate change or the increasing complexity of ESG measurement — far ahead of other themes such as market volatility and regulation. But it is not the only transformation. A new wave of data technologies is bringing very significant changes to investment processes. These technologies open the door to new ways of understanding markets and increasing efficiency.

The physical impacts of climate change on the built environment are becoming more significant and have the potential to be extremely costly. With their locations fixed, buildings themselves may be at risk of suffering significant damage costs from climate change impacts. More so, buildings are often energy-intensive to build and operate. They are responsible for over a third of global final energy consumption and CO2 emissions, with operational emissions mostly through space heating and cooling, and water heating (IEA, 2019). MSCI’s scenario analysis for commercial and residential real estate enables investors and real estate managers to evaluate both transition and physical climate-related impacts in their portfolios.

Find out more about MSCI Real Estate Climate Value-at-Risk solution here

Green Real Estate Trend #1 GREEN IS IN

Green Real Estate Trend #2 CERTIFICATION VS. GREENWASHING

Green Real Estate Trend #3 USERS ARE DRIVING GREEN

Green Real Estate Trend #4 GREEN BUSINESS IS GOOD BUSINESS