Risk management and asset allocation
We aim to provide our clients with a clear assessment of climate risk. Both measurement and management of climate risk are areas of significant development in the investment industry and we strive to continue to play our part in progressing this development.
We aim to embed the assessment of climate risk and opportunity at three levels in fully discretionary delegated investment portfolios:
- Top-down – We periodically re-assess the financial case for and parameters of our net zero commitment taking account the progress of factors including the level of ambition of government commitments, the transition of the broader economy towards net zero, climate science/scenarios and WTW’s own research on climate risk.
- Asset allocation – We use detailed climate scenarios to stress test our multi-asset and single asset class portfolios, and identify key thematic risks and opportunities.
- Security-level analysis – Our proprietary physical and transition risk analytics enable us to get a much better understanding of the true financial climate risk in investment portfolios.
Our goal is to ensure fully discretionary delegated investment portfolios are robust and climate resilient as well as being well placed to benefit from the opportunities presented by the transition to net zero.
Manager selection
Our goal is to identify best-in-class asset managers and to work with them to build portfolios that deliver strong risk-adjusted returns over the long term. An assessment of how well climate-related issues, as well as wider sustainability issues, are factored into an asset manager’s investment process is a significant part of our manager research and selection process.
The manager selection and engagement process must permit the inclusion of a wide range of strategies to ensure that the portfolio retains all other vital characteristics. The point is not to only focus on strategies that are performing well according to the ‘Climate Dashboard’ but to consider competent managers and strategies that may be somewhat challenged in terms of their climate performance and support them on their journey to improve.
For strategies where we feel improvement is required, we engage with the manager. This might, for example, relate to emissions, alignment and climate solutions, or an improvement in their climate change risk management (physical or transition).
We work with managers to identify specific assets with compelling long-term prospects and which fall in areas that are a part of the solution to a net-zero economy. We have invested in opportunities across sustainable agriculture, forestry, electrification infrastructure, and renewable energy amongst others.
Index design
Historically the choice of market index or benchmark has often been considered a second-order decision by many investors. However, we have always viewed this as an active decision that has a material influence on the investment that asset managers make.
We actively assess the characteristics of market indices and make a deliberate choice of which to use – climate risk is one of the factors we use in this decision. We provide this assessment as advice to clients or as part of our discretionary investment process.
We also actively contribute to the construction of new indices where we believe it will produce better outcomes for our clients. Our proprietary climate transition analytics are used to assess transition risk in quoted companies and to design indices that better account for climate value-at-risk than traditional market cap indices.
Stewardship and industry engagement
Investment decisions about individual securities are made by the asset managers we employ on our client’s behalf. We assess the managers' ability to reflect climate risk in their decisions when selecting securities, and we regularly engage with the asset management industry regarding their stewardship practices.
We were part of the first wave of signatories to the updated 2020 UK Stewardship Code and remain current signatories of the Code.
In addition to engagement with external asset managers and underlying issuers, we also engage with wider industry groups to support wider system transition on climate. In some cases we can take the lead on initiatives and in others we can support those organisations that are well placed to lead. These are detailed in our UK Stewardship Code Report with some examples below:
- The Thinking Ahead Institute (TAI), our not-for-profit think-tank with many of the world’s largest asset owners and asset managers as members, has a mission to ‘mobilise capital for a sustainable future’; TAI has been involved in the creation of climate dashboards and the identification of changes required at asset owners in order to become a net zero organisation, among other relevant topics.
- The WTW Research Network (WRN) was founded by WTW and is a well-established, not-for-profit, award-winning collaboration between science and the insurance, finance and risk management sector, going back to 2006. Long-term partnerships with more than 60 research organizations across the world help the network confront the full spectrum of risks facing our societies. Climate has been a key focus of WRN.
- For some of our delegated mandates, we have engaged EOS at Federated Hermes (EOS) as an expert collaborative stewardship overlay service who supplements and adds to the stewardship work performed by the external asset managers we work with. In addition to the bottom-up company engagement, EOS undertake market-wide engagement and advocacy.
- WTW co-founded the Investment Consultants Sustainability Working Group (ICSWG) in 2020 and membership of this initiative has grown to nearly 20 organizations in both the UK and US groups. Both groups have established links with regulatory and oversight bodies, as well as the asset management and asset owner communities. WTW has representation in the UK and US ICSWG’s Steering Committees and in the UK Raise the Bar workstream.
- We support IIGCC’s Net Zero Investment Framework and are Signatories to the Principles for Responsible Investment.