Originally published December 14 2005
Investors now consider the impact of global warming as a factor in their decisions
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Nick Robins, head of SRI (Socially Responsible Investment) Funds for London firm Henderson Global Investors discusses how global warming has become an interest for investors and financial consultants, who will build portfolios with the effects of global warming firmly in mind.
A good grasp on global warming could also offer benefits to savvy stock pickers.
Businesses well-poised to meet mandates for reducing carbon emissions, developers of alternate energy sources and even forward-looking insurers could conceivably profit from climate-change concern, say analysts and institutional investors who follow climate change.
Today, Robins said, climate change is becoming a mainstream concern for portfolio managers.
Publicly traded companies, in turn, are facing pressure to expand disclosure about how they're addressing the warming trend.
Science in a snapshot: Canada won't be turning into a tropical paradise anytime soon.
But evidence shows our environment has gotten warmer over the past few decades and likely will continue to do so.
The increase in Northern Hemisphere temperatures in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century in the past 1,000 years, according to the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Assessing risks: Investors today have broadly accepted the science behind global-warming projections, said Dan Bakal, director of electric power programs at Ceres, a sustainable-investment research and advocacy group.
Calculating those impacts has gotten easier in recent years as more public companies disclose climate-related risks in securities filings.
Friends of the Earth, an environmental group, reported (.pdf) that 47 percent of 112 large publicly traded companies surveyed in the auto, manufacturing, oil and gas, insurance, utilities and petrochemicals sectors addressed climate change in securities filings last year.
That's up from 37 percent the prior year.
A report published by Ceres and updated following Hurricane Katrina cites a 15-fold increase in insured losses from catastrophic weather events (those with over $1 billion of damages) in the past three decades.
While the catastrophes can't entirely be blamed on global warming, Ceres considers it an undeniable contributing factor.
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