The following is a transcript of our monthly podcast, The Pension Confident Podcast. Listen to episode 36 or scroll on to read the conversation.
PHILIPPA: Hi, welcome. Here’s a question for you. Have you ever wondered if your pension is funding climate change? We all know about the damage greenhouse gases do to the world, so it’s not a comfortable thought. And according to Make My Money Matter, by greening our pensions, we could cut our carbon footprint 21 times more than by going veggie, or giving up flying or switching energy providers.
But with the new US President favouring oil exploration and our own government talking about more runways at major airports, would investing in a more sustainable pension really make any difference at all to climate change?
These are big questions and with sustainable investing being a quite fresh idea, it’s been met with some scepticism over the years. So today, we’re going to dig into the detail to help you make confident choices about your own pension. Talking of which, if you haven’t subscribed to the podcast yet, why not click right now so you never miss an episode.
I’m Philippa Lamb, and here to shed light on sustainable pensions, I’ve got three guests with me. Rotimi Merriman-Johnson, he’s a qualified Financial Adviser and Founder of Mr MoneyJar, his financial education company. Jesse Griffiths is CEO of the Finance Innovation Lab. They’re working to build a financial system which serves both people and the planet. And from PensionBee this time, we’re joined by Giorgia Antonacci. She’s Senior ESG Manager, and she knows all there is to know about sustainable pensions. Hello, everyone.
GIORGIA: Hello.
ROTIMI: Good morning.
JESSE: Hi, good to be here.
PHILIPPA:The usual disclaimer before we start, please do remember anything discussed on the podcast shouldn’t be regarded as financial advice or legal advice, and when investing, your capital is at risk.
The link between pensions and climate change
PHILIPPA: Now, I thought we might start with the real basics, Giorgia. What’s my pension got to do with climate change?
GIORGIA: When we think about climate change, there are a few things that come to our minds quite immediately, and I’m quite sure that pensions aren’t one of those. But actually, our finances, and in particular, our pensions, are the very first thing we should be looking at if we want to understand, to begin with, and then try and address the negative impact that we can have on the environment.
PHILIPPA: This is because our pension funds invest in companies that are involved in climate change. Is that right?
GIORGIA: Yes, exactly. Our pension funds obviously hold stocks in oil, gas companies, and these investments help fossil fuel companies to expand their operations, extract more resources, and ultimately delay the transition to renewable energy.
PHILIPPA: I saw some data from Greenpeace saying 30% of fossil fuel industry shares are held by pension funds. That’s globally. It’s a big number, isn’t it?
GIORGIA:There’s something like £88 billion invested in fossil fuel companies just in the UK pension funds.
PHILIPPA: OK, so the link is there. It’s a big link. Rotimi, is it true - here’s another piece of data that I heard - every £10 you put in your pension, £2 is linked to deforestation?
ROTIMI: Yeah, so Make My Money Matter, the campaigning group that you mentioned in the introduction, they found that over £300 billion of UK pension fund investments are invested into companies with deforestation risk. That breaks down as £2 in every £10 you save being exposed to deforestation risk or about 31% of companies.
PHILIPPA: Jesse, it’s important to understand, isn’t it, that it’s not just about what we might think of as ‘dirty’ industries that are associated with climate change?
JESSE: No, and I think there’s two points. One is that almost everything we do has a carbon emission associated with it. Obviously, fossil fuels are the main driver of climate change, but that’s also linked to agriculture, the food we eat, it’s linked to the clothes we wear, the way we get around. But it’s also true that it’s linked to a lot of other environmental problems which are as damaging or potentially even more damaging than climate change, of which deforestation and destruction of nature - the destruction of our seas, the destruction of our soils.
The fossil fuel industry
PHILIPPA: OK, so I think we’ve established the link between pension investing and potentially climate change. Jesse, why do pension funds keep investing in these stocks? We know they’re damaging.
JESSE: Well, I think there’s probably two reasons. One is that you can make money from investing in fossil fuels still.
PHILIPPA: It’s profitable.
JESSE: Historically, it’s been very profitable. There’s one study that estimates that the fossil fuel industry has, over 30 years, made about a trillion dollars a year in profit. So it’s historically been very profitable, although that’s changing. But the second is that I think pension funds and the economics profession in general are not really understanding climate change well enough. There’s a recent study from Carbon Tracker that shows that many pension funds are using economic models that assume there will be no risk, no economic or financial risk from climate change, which is completely against what the climate scientists are telling us. We’ve got a real problem about understanding how climate change impacts our financial sector and our economy.
PHILIPPA: Is the financial services industry just willfully burying its head in the sand there? I’m surprised to hear you say that.
JESSE: I think there’s some of that, but I think there’s also just a lot more education that’s needed, and in particular, I think the government needs to act to help the industry move much quicker than it is at the moment.
Does investing sustainably mean lower returns?
PHILIPPA: In the past, we’ve tended to think, “yeah, I can do that, but the returns I’m going to get, they’re going to be much lower. When it comes to pensions, my pension pot, which is obviously incredibly important as an investment asset, is going to be smaller. Really, do I want to do that?” Is it still true?
GIORGIA: I was waiting for this question. I’m very passionate about it, and I’ve got notes!
PHILIPPA: Great, go for it.
GIORGIA: I think this is actually a false myth, and there’s actually research evidence showing that ESG funds, or sustainable funds, actually outperform traditional funds. There’s this very interesting report from the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing that they publish every year, and it’s called The Sustainable Reality Report. In 2023, sustainable funds outperformed their traditional peers across all major asset classes.
PHILIPPA: How are they managing to do that?
GIORGIA: There’s a very strict correlation between companies that are sustainable and that have sustainable business practices and their financial performance. The overall performance in general of sustainable funds in 2023 was 12.6%. Traditional funds, 8.6%, so we can see a 4% difference.
PHILIPPA: Do we know why?
JESSE: Well, because there’s a very strong correlation between how well your investments perform and how well the economy does. In the UK, for example, in the last year for which we’ve got data, the net zero economy, the green economy, grew by 9%, whilst the overall economy grew by a bit less than 1%. The green economy is where the growth is happening and where the growth will happen in the future. I think if I could add to that, for me, the main reason why we should care about climate change, if we think about our pensions, is because the current trajectory of climate change is very bleak for our futures because of climate change.
The Institute of Actuaries just did a study this month, and their estimates is that if we carry on in the best case scenario, where we get to about three degrees of global warming, then our economy will shrink by 50-70% in the next 40 years, which will be absolutely catastrophic for all of our retirement savings, for all of our retirements. We’ve got to do something about climate change if we want to save enough money to have a decent retirement.
PHILIPPA: OK, so the general view around the table is that a sustainable pension isn’t going to be a bad investment compared to a traditional pension. I guess there’s an argument that polluter stocks, they’re the ones that are going to be more vulnerable in the future.
ROTIMI: Hopefully.
PHILIPPA: If you just look at it in a hard-headed financial way, that’s a reasonable argument, I’m guessing. You’d expect that sustainable assets would gain in popularity and value?
JESSE: I think it links to your volatility point. At some point, as governments do ratchet up their response to climate change, those stocks will look less and less attractive, and at some point could lose their value quite quickly. That’s one reason why the Financial Stability Board, the global institution, had a study out this month saying that we can expect a lot more financial crises in the future if we don’t do something about climate change. Both because climate change creates economic problems and because of the change that we’re going through, shifting the value of fossil fuel stocks and other climate-destroying stocks, which could lose their value very quickly. If your pension fund happens to be invested heavily in them, you could lose a lot of money.
The rising cost of living
PHILIPPA: Presumably also climate change, I think we know don’t we, that it contributes to the rising cost of living. Investing in that arena, you’re buying into the idea that life will be more expensive in the future anyway. So even potentially, if you had a bigger pension pot, it wouldn’t go as far. Does that argument stand up?
GIORGIA: Yes. Extreme weather events are becoming more and more frequent, and we see that around us everywhere. But sometimes a major extreme weather event happens somewhere in the world, on the other side of the globe, and we think it’s so far away from us that it doesn’t really affect us. But that’s not true. There are a few examples. For instance, in 2022, if I’m not wrong, there was a heat wave in India that affected the wheat yields, and that caused the wheat price all over the globe to spike. It’s like that butterfly effect. Electricity bills are going to become more expensive. Food is going to become more expensive because crop yields are going to be impacted and transportation of goods will become more expensive. That’s something we don’t think about, I think.
PHILIPPA: Well, particularly in Europe, because we’re quite insulated, aren’t we, at the moment from the more dramatic effects of climate change.
JESSE: But I think we also shouldn’t forget quite how much vulnerability and uncertainty dependence on fossil fuels has caused in the past as well as what it’ll cause in the future. We know the war in Ukraine has been fueled by fossil fuels. We’re very dependent on regimes that aren’t our friends for the supply of those fossil fuels. Prices have been highly volatile - they’ve caused major economic problems many times. So a fossil fuel economy isn’t a safe, stable, lovely economy either. Actually, if we can transition rapidly to a green economy where we own electricity production through renewables, for example, we can have a much safer world and also one where prices should be more stable.
Can individuals make a difference?
PHILIPPA: Yeah, in an ideal world. But as you say, thinking about politics right now, we’re not a political podcast, but we really can’t avoid them right now. We have the new US President backing more oil and gas exploration. Our own UK government is talking about new runways at major airports. It’s hard, I think, for people to understand they can make a difference with their own investing decisions when they see governments sticking to the old ways. It’s quite a disincentive, isn’t it?
JESSE: Well, I think that’s why we have to see ourselves as investors and as citizens. So yes, we should be making the most of our power as investors, because if we can persuade our pension funds and other places we invest to change their attitudes, that has an impact. And it also creates momentum for change towards the government. It’s ultimately the government that’ll need to make sure that the incentives and penalties are there to drive us fast enough. Because it’s not just, the pensions industry is obviously a major part of the financial and economic system, but it’s only part, there’s also other investors who maybe won’t be so minded to go as fast as our pension funds, which should have our best interests at heart. That’ll require regulation and government policy to push those investors where we need to go.
PHILIPPA: Thinking about individual customers, most people don’t use sustainable pensions right now. How many of us would it take to really make a difference?
ROTIMI: The literature I’ve seen has suggested that if between 10% to 20% of pension investors were to green their pensions and invest sustainably in their pensions, that could go a long way to making a difference. Because what a lot of people don’t realise is when we look at total household wealth in the UK, which is about £14 or £15 trillion, 42% of all of that is in pensions.
PHILIPPA: It’s not just about the money, is it? It’s not actually just about the number, it’s about the message we send to the industry?
JESSE: The key point is acting to change the way we all think about climate change, which includes the industries, but also includes society as a whole. So speaking to your friends and everybody doing their part is very important. But we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that ultimately the only act that can push us fast enough will be the government changing the incentives and penalties for the industry. That’s partly true because of the issues we’ve talked about before, where some people can still make money from destroying nature and the climate. But also because the pension system in the UK is very unequal. The bottom 50% of the population has 1% of total pension wealth, and the top 10% has almost two-thirds. Whilst that top 10% can have an influence with the way that they invest, most people will have very little influence through the money they have.
PHILIPPA: That they actually save.
JESSE: But they can have a big influence as citizens in terms of who they vote for, the campaigns they support, supporting the work of organisations that are trying to get the pensions and financial industry to change.
PHILIPPA: That’s an interesting point, isn’t it? Even if you don’t have much money to invest in your pension each month, even if you don’t think of yourself as a significant part of the financial sector, you can make a difference.
GIORGIA: Yes. I think we can’t think of our pension as like an individual pot just sitting there and being invested in some random stocks because usually pension funds are pooled funds, so they’re invested in big funds and the asset managers take money from all of the members and invest them together. If we put pressure on the asset managers, then we can have a positive influence.
PHILIPPA: I’m thinking that if people are going to make these choices, they’re really going to want to feel confident that the pension fund they’re going for is genuinely sustainable because I think we can all agree there’s been quite a lot of misinformation, mislabeling, in the green arena, right from things like supermarket products, which perhaps aren’t as eco friendly as we’ve been led to believe in some instances. All that sort of thing, I think, plays into an understandable level of scepticism amongst consumers. Giorgia, this is you. How do you create a genuinely sustainable pension fund? What goes into it? How does it work?
What makes a sustainable pension fund?
GIORGIA: At PensionBee we have a vision where everyone can enjoy a happy retirement. We believe that a happy retirement needs sustainable long-term returns, but also a fair, healthy, safe world to retire into, because otherwise, what’s the point of saving for retirement? That’s why we incorporate ESG factors, environmental, social, and governance, into our investment approach. We do that through ESG exclusionary screens and Active Ownership.
PHILIPPA: OK, explanation?
GIORGIA: You basically just exclude certain sectors or industries from the investment universe, from the investment portfolio, based on specific sustainability criteria.
PHILIPPA: You’re not investing your customers’ money in things that you consider don’t match those ESG aspirations?
GIORGIA: Obviously, it’s not that easy because you can’t just take an industry and remove it from a fund.
PHILIPPA: Well, that’s my question, really. How ‘green’ are they?
GIORGIA: There are funds that follow specific criteria. If you’re investing in a fund that says it excludes fossil fuel there has to be transparency. You know that your fund won’t be investing in that industry.
Greenwashing, labelling and timescales
PHILIPPA: ‘Sustainable funds’ is a broad term, isn’t it, Jessie? This idea of what exactly will they be investing in, it’s not quite as simple as it sounds, is it?
JESSE: It’s not. Unfortunately, it’s an industry where there’s a lot of what’s called greenwashing, where funds claim to be sustainable but aren’t if you dig a little bit deeper. It really is quite important that you invest through [funds] that have been in some way verified to be properly sustainable. That’s quite difficult for each individual person to do, and even sometimes for pension funds and others to do. But the government is about to launch a review of ESG standards in the UK. Hopefully, we can get to a better government or regulator set of minimum standards that you might have to meet if you’re going to claim some of these sustainability criteria that you do.
PHILIPPA: OK, so that there would be across the piece standards. Rotimi’s nodding here, and people would actually understand the labelling system as it were.
ROTIMI: Yes. There are a few things that I’d recommend to people to check out. The first thing is MSCI’s ESG rating scale. MSCI stands for Morgan Stanley Capital international, and they rate companies and funds on the scale from AAA to CCC based on their ESG standards. Here in the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has launched four sustainability labels. But then there’s also in terms of the Active Ownership that Giorgia mentioned, if there are businesses or companies that you believe in, you can also choose to own those directly. You might already be aware of the company, or you could look at the constituents of a sustainable fund and look at the companies that that fund is made up of. You can do it through doing your own research as well.
PHILIPPA: OK. Jesse, this is exactly what your organisation argues for more sustainable finance. Is this system that Rotimi has just described, is that what you’re after?
JESSE: I think what we need to get to is a system where the FCA and other regulators give the gold standard to anything that claims to be sustainable. And it has rigorous, as Giorgia said, rigorous ways of proving that. There are proper exclusions, for example, investment in fossil fuels and a proper assessment of what they’re actually investing in. So it’s not left to individual funds to define that, but it’s something that’s standardised across the whole industry.
PHILIPPA: Just to be clear, that doesn’t happen right now. Individual funds make their claims based on their own idea of what ESG and sustainable means. So comparing one fund to another, if you’re trying to choose one, it’s not that straightforward for ordinary customers, is it?
JESSE: It’s not. It’s partly because at the moment a lot of sustainable funds are basically saying, “we’re not doing any of the worst things that you could imagine”, but they’re not actively doing very much to shift the economy in the way which we need to do it.
PHILIPPA: So they’re gesturing towards being more sustainable but not really putting their backs into it.
JESSE: Yeah. For example, one way in which you can create an index that’s more sustainable is you take your money out of energy stocks and you put them into tech stocks. But tech stocks have a large carbon impact as well.
PHILIPPA: Yes
JESSE: It’s not as simple as just saying, “OK, we just get out of these little bits and we move to these bits”. You actually have to actively be trying to invest, I’d argue, into the green economy of the future if you want to claim to be a truly sustainable fund.
PHILIPPA: From what you’re all saying, this is the tipping point, isn’t it? There needs to be confidence. There needs to be a labelling system that people can believe in. There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors right now, isn’t there? It’s hard for people to feel confident. We’re not quite there yet, are we?
JESSE: We’re not, but there’s a large programme of reform, the government’s undertaking, the regulator’s undertaking, that could get us there. For example, they’re developing a green taxonomy, which would be a proper way of saying this investment is actually green and this one isn’t. They’re developing standards for transition plans. Those are the plans that each individual company has to say how they’ll meet net zero, and those need to be rigorously enforced. They’re doing improvements to ESG ratings as well. There’s a lot that’s going on, and the question is, can we persuade our government to go fast enough?
PHILIPPA: What’s the time frame on this? When would you hope that we might see this new framework, this more transparent framework actually in place?
JESSE: Well, it’s happening now. They just closed the green taxonomy consultation last week, so that’s ongoing now. They’re about to open transition plans. It’s all happening right now. This year/next year will be absolutely crucial. Perhaps actually the biggest thing is the government has promised the largest reform of the pensions industry for 20 years, which has already started and which will carry on for the next two years or so. So there’s this huge opportunity for those of us who care about our futures to put pressure on the government, to say “you’ve got to green that pensions review. We can’t be living in a world where we have looked after our financial interests, but actually we’ve destroyed the planet”.
What action can pension savers take?
PHILIPPA: It’s a big challenge, isn’t it? Thinking, as you say, about what individuals can do. You can find out what your own pension is invested in, can’t you? I think a lot of people don’t understand this. How do you do it?
GIORGIA: I guess to begin with, you can ask your pension provider. You can definitely access the top 10 or top 20 holdings in your pension. That’s very important because probably the top 20 holdings will make up the most of your pension.
PHILIPPA: The vast majority of it. OK. Yeah, sounds like a plan.
ROTIMI: Looking at the fund that your pension is invested in, you can look at the top 20. If the pension platform that you’re using doesn’t disclose that, then you can always do an internet search of the fund name and see if the fund management company itself has published the constituents.
PHILIPPA: OK, and do they tend to do that?
ROTIMI: In my experience, yeah, they tend to. Sometimes you might just get a broad breakdown of a certain percentage of equities and bonds and cash. But actually, most of the time, I’ve been able to see what the constituents are.
JESSE: I’d also say that you don’t need to put quite as much pressure on yourself to do all the research. Why can’t you just write to your pension [provider]? Send them an email, ask them what they’re doing. Ask them to justify how their investments will meet your needs to have a safe climate in the future.
Influencing change
PHILIPPA: Yeah, because as individuals, obviously, we don’t have voting rights on any of this. We give them our money and we trust them to invest it appropriately. The big institutional investors, on the other hand, they do have muscle, don’t they? How do they play into all this? They have voting rights. They can actually make things change. Presumably, we can influence them?
GIORGIA: We can. We could say that pension investors, pension savers, have shares in the companies their pensions are invested in. These shares come with voting rights. But obviously, we can’t exercise these voting rights directly because of how the pension funds are structured as pooled funds where all of the money is pooled and invested in the same fund. But our asset managers can vote at the AGM, the Annual General Meetings of these companies, and can either put pressure on how these companies behave or they can just support management and keep the status quo as it is.
PHILIPPA: Are we seeing asset managers becoming more inclined to pressure companies in this way?
GIORGIA: I think so. There are a few large asset managers who are doing a lot in this space, which is very encouraging. But for instance, at PensionBee, historically, because we’re an institutional client, so we weren’t allowed to vote directly at the AGMs. But after years of discussion with our asset managers, we were finally granted voting choice. We can now vote at the AGMs of those companies on behalf of our customers. For instance, last year we surveyed our customers and we presented them a few real-life scenarios of shareholder resolutions that happened. We asked our customers how they would’ve wanted to vote at those AGMs.
PHILIPPA: Right, and what did they say?
GIORGIA: We chose as our voting policy, the socially responsible investment policy. From the survey results, we understood that our customers are happy with that voting policy because it reflects their expectations and their views.
PHILIPPA: This feels like it’s moving more to where it should be in the sense that the individual people who are handing over their cash to be invested in a pension fund can tell their pension provider what they want their money invested in. It’s feeling a bit better, isn’t it?
JESSE: Yes, and it’s worth highlighting the work of ShareAction, a brilliant organisation that’s really pioneered this approach. You can check out their website and find out more about them. I think it’s important, but there’s obviously limitations to that approach. I think one limitation we’ve discovered in the last few years is fossil fuel companies have proven that they don’t really have any intention to transition. They’ve actually been cutting back their investments in renewable alternatives and increasing their investments in fossil fuels. There comes a point at which you have to say, “well, actually any investment in that company isn’t compatible with a sustainable future. Yes, we should use that shareholder pressure, but we need to be careful about which companies we’re trying to push”.
GIORGIA: That’s why we developed our Climate Plan, because we surveyed our customers in our fossil fuel free investing plan last year. We asked them their views about the plan, and they told us that they wanted to go further in the exclusion, and that links with what you said because there are some industries that you just can’t engage with. They told us they wanted to go further with the exclusions, but that they also wanted to invest more in green revenues.
PHILIPPA: OK, so you developed the new plan off the back of what your customers said they wanted?
GIORGIA: Yes.
Final thoughts
ROTIMI: I think it’s tricky for customers as well. If I could invoke Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If you aren’t able to feed and clothe yourself comfortably, you’re not making as much money as you’d like. If the economy isn’t stable, then you’re not necessarily going to have the headspace to be thinking about things like climate change and how green your investments are, like a privilege that you have when you have time.
PHILIPPA: Absolutely. It’s not top of the list, is it, for most people?
ROTIMI: No, like survival is.
PHILIPPA: Feeding the family, holding on to a job.
ROTIMI: This is why I think we’re asking so much of our government, but I think it’s really important that we get a handle of the cost of living. I think a lot of people would want to do something about what we’re discussing today, but they simply don’t have the time or the bandwidth.
PHILIPPA: It feels too far in the future, doesn’t it?
ROTIMI: Yeah.
PHILIPPA: It doesn’t feel like it’s immediately impacting us. So people put it down, perfectly understandably, I think, to the bottom of the list.
ROTIMI: But what I’d say to that is we shouldn’t ignore it because the one advantage that we have is that - we can all remember the pandemic, right? It was like -
PHILIPPA: We can.
ROTIMI: We were aware of the risks posed by an airborne respiratory virus, and we didn’t do anything about it. Then one day we were allowed to go outside, and then the next day we weren’t. We’re aware of how a challenge can brew under the surface, and then once it’s here, it’s here now. So climate change is a very similar problem in that regard.
JESSE: The cost of living point is really important, but there’s hope as well as problems here, aren’t there? The first point to make is, of course, that we’ve experienced really high and volatile energy prices recently -
PHILIPPA: Yes.
JESSE: - caused by the price of gas. If the government can get to its clean power by 2030, everything will be renewable [in the] electricity system, then we should have much more stable, much lower prices locked in for a long period of time. Actually, from a cost of living perspective, we need to make this transition quickly. But also there’s one study that estimates that by 2030, solar power will be the cheapest form of electricity in every single country in the world because the costs of solar power are coming down so quickly. The economy is changing, and if we don’t get on board with that as a country, as investors, as citizens, then we’re going to miss out.
PHILIPPA: Right. I’m going to draw that to a close. I know we can keep on talking about this all day, but I think it’s been really fascinating so far. I have learned a lot, so thank you all very much indeed.
Interesting, wasn’t it? Good to understand more about what sustainable pensions actually are. Thanks for being with us. If you found this episode helpful, please do rate and review us. We really appreciate it.
Before we go, the usual disclaimer just one more time. Please remember, anything discussed on the podcast shouldn’t be regarded as financial advice or legal advice, and when investing, your capital is at risk. See you next time.
Risk warning
As always with investments, your capital is at risk. The value of your investment can go down as well as up, and you may get back less than you invest. This information should not be regarded as financial advice.
