By Gwladys Fouche
OSLO (Reuters) – Norway’s $1.3 trillion sovereign wealth fund will ask many of the companies in its portfolio to take more specific action on climate change, its head of governance and compliance said.
“We have for a long time focused on better company disclosure … Now we are focusing more on actions. So now you need to go from numbers to action, concrete steps that companies are taking to meet the expectations,” Carine Smith Ihenacho said in an interview at the Reuters Next conference on Wednesday.
One of the world’s largest investors, the fund holds stakes in around 9,100 companies worldwide, owning 1.4% of all listed stocks. It has set the pace on a host of issues in the environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) field.
The fund estimated its portfolio’s carbon footprint was 107.6 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2019 – roughly twice what Norway emitted that year.
It was set up 25 years ago to share revenues from Norway’s oil and gas industry with future generations and has invested its funds abroad in stocks, bonds, property and unlisted renewable projects.
The fund is also for the first time setting out expectations to the companies it invests in on how they protect nature’s biodiversity.
“The first step is really to assess in some depth, which companies are the most exposed, which companies are lagging, and then we’ll engage with selected companies, in particular in exposed sectors, (such as the) food sector, the extractive sector,” Smith Ihenacho said.
“For the voting season it may be that we will start to vote against the company chairs, or chairs of relevant committees, where we believe they’re not addressing this in an adequate manner.”
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(Writing by Terje Solsvik, Nerijus Adomaitis and Gwladys Fouche; Editing by Jason Neely and Alexander Smith)
