At AIM, we continue to be focussed on our vision to mobilise capital to address the challenges the world faces. Impact measurement and reporting is a critical part of our investment process and we are excited to launch our 2019 Impact Reports. We currently manage over US$770m of assets on behalf of clients globally who seek to generate fixed income returns with a positive environmental and social impact.
Importantly, in our 2019 Impact Reports on average we have achieved approximately 90% coverage across all of our portfolios. Our coverage includes more than 140 impact bond frameworks and over 1,500 projects. Our strong relationships and depth of engagement by our Verification and Impact, Credit and Portfolio Management teams with issuers has allowed us to achieve such high coverage, despite challenges presented by COVID-19. We are also pleased to report 17 out of 17 of the Sustainable Developed Goals are supported across our portfolios.
Some key highlights across our portfolios for 2019 include:
- 94,254 tonnes of GHG avoided per year (equivalent to charging 12 billion smartphones for use for a day – or over 1.5 times the global population)
- 1,326,176m³ of water treated daily (equivalent to 530 Olympic-size swimming pools daily)
- 34,252 daily passenger capacity for low carbon transport (at over 12.5 million annually, similar to the population of Mumbai)
This year we have continued to build on the transparency and depth of our reporting. We have expanded our reporting to include TCFD recommended physical risk scenario testing and carbon metrics.
As part of our continued commitment to pioneering best practice in impact bond verification, measurement and reporting, during 2019 we partnered with South Pole to produce a pilot case study, Assessing Physical Risks of Green Bonds, which can be found here. This year, in our impact reports we rolled out the South Pole physical risk assessment across all our portfolios using four global warming scenarios to better understand the climate risk profile of our investments.
“As a climate leader, AIM has undertaken groundbreaking work to implement a TCFD-aligned climate-risk assessment for the green bond market.
Physical risk modelling and data tools, such as South Pole’s climate risk assessments, empower investors like AIM to address the vulnerabilities and boost the resilience of green assets. Improved reporting on climate-related risk and better insights into the adaptive capacity of green projects can ultimately benefit issuers and investors alike.”
Rebecca Self, Director of Sustainable Finance, South Pole
We also expanded our carbon reporting to include TCFD-recommended carbon metrics for asset managers, supplementing our climate mitigation impact disclosure. We report on the carbon savings associated with our investments following the Carbon Yield® methodology, which was co–developed in 2016 by AIM, ISS ESG and Lion’s Head Global Partners, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.
“Green Bonds have the potential to finance the transformation of the real economy. This requires a standardized approach to transparently quantify the greenhouse gas emissions the bonds help avoid. AIM was a pioneer in adopting the carbon yield methodology to assess and report greenhouse gas savings. ISS ESG is proud to have carried out this analysis for the past 4 years.”
Maximilian Horster, Managing Director, Head of Climate at ISS ESG.
Our high reporting standards were recently recognised by Environmental Finance, awarding AIM ‘Best sustainability reporting by an asset or fund manager, medium and small (fixed income)’ at the Environmental Finance 2020 Sustainable Investment Awards.
We are proud of the environmental and social impact we had across our portfolios during 2019. We work hard to engage the wider impact bond market to share best practices. We look forward to discussing our results with you and thank our investors for their continued support.