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Introducing Portfolio Explorer
We have developed Portfolio Explorer to tell the stories of the companies we invest in across our different investment strategies. Each investment strategy invests in different companies and we group these by geographical regions.
Porfolio ExplorerHow companies are contributing to sustainable development
Sustainable development is the achievement of high levels of human development within global ecological limits. As investors, we focus on understanding the contributions individual companies make to sustainable development from the bottom-up. To do this well, we believe that qualitative assessments are as important as quantitative measures.
It is for this reason that we have developed our Portfolio Explorer tool to tell the stories of the companies we invest in across our regional and global strategies. These stories have been written by our own team so that our clients and other stakeholders can see why we believe that the companies we invest in are making the world a better place.
Four views of sustainable development
We have provided four views of our strategies.
Map: Use this global view to find detailed company information including our investment rationales, risks and area to improve.
Climate solutions: We map companies to Project Drawdown’s c.90 climate change solutions.* Project Drawdown is a non-profit organisation that has modelled over 90 different climate solutions that it believes will contribute to reaching ‘drawdown’ – i.e. the future point in time when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing and start to steadily decline. The solutions are diverse and cross-cutting, and show the systemic change needed to avoid catastrophic warming.
Human development pillars: We have developed our own 10 human development pillars, by reference to, amongst other things, the UN Human Development Index that we believe encapsulate the essence of human development.
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the heart of the United Nations 2030 agenda for sustainable development at a country level and provide a useful, albeit broad, framework covering a range of issues.
Questions about Portfolio Explorer
What is different about this tool?
1. There are no magic numbers or easy answers, just stories of high-quality companies that are well positioned to contribute to and benefit from sustainable development.
We launched our Asia Pacific sustainable development strategy in 2005. When investing in Asia Pacific and emerging markets it is clear that sustainable development is not just about a single issue like climate change, gender equity or poverty alleviation - it is about all of them because they are all interconnected.
This holistic view of sustainable development means that companies can contribute in many different ways to a better future for people and planet. To reflect this, the tool avoids attributing scores to the companies we invest in and also avoids a focus on a handful of standardised indicators, which are more often about operational efficiency than company impact. Instead, the tool allows viewers to explore the stories of individual companies organised by the diverse contributions they make.
2. Written by our own team, not third-party researchers or external marketers
The company stories are backed by evidence and collected by our team using their years of experience in sustainable investing. We do not rely on third-party researchers to tell us what is sustainable. Instead, we do our own analysis and rigorously test it through company meetings, team discussions and specially commissioned research. We then relate each contribution back to frameworks like Project Drawdown to test our assumptions.
3. Shows the world the same way we see it, focused on individual companies bottom-up, long term and on real solutions to difficult problems
We do not claim to have all the answers to the many difficult sustainable development challenges the world faces, nor do we believe that we need to. We believe that investing in high-quality companies run by people with integrity and a long-term view is the best way to invest money, enabling organisations to positively touch the lives of people around the world and driving the solutions to environmental challenges. These attributes are also the ones we believe will deliver good investment returns for clients. The tool groups companies around solutions, but ultimately is designed to allow users to explore companies in the way that best suits them.
4. Provides a balanced view of the companies we invest in
We know that no company is perfect (just like investors!). We encourage our companies to improve in ways that will increase their sustainable development contribution and make them a better investment over the long term. The tool provides a balanced view for the companies we invest in, highlighting the positive contributions, but also the risks and areas to improve.
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