Best sustainability report by an asset or fund manager: medium and small (fixed income): Affirmative Investment Management

After winning the award in 2020, Affirmative Investment Management (AIM) has once again won the award for Best Fixed Income Sustainability Report as it continues to improve and evolve its reporting approach to sustainability. ‘impact.

In 2021, the $1.1 billion asset manager expanded its impact reporting coverage to 90% of its portfolios. This high level of coverage is mainly the result of the firm’s focus on collecting data internally, unlike many other asset managers, she claims.

“Collecting project-level data is a key area that asset managers continue to struggle with, as evidenced by low portfolio coverage percentages,” said AIM’s sustainability team. Environmental financing. “At AIM, we collect all impact data internally and work with issuers to obtain the project-level metrics we need for our impact reporting. Part of our initial verification criteria requires us to review an issuer’s commitment to transparency and reporting for an issue to meet our verification threshold.

For this reason, AIM is always able to provide 90% coverage for its portfolios. Additionally, the AIM team said this internal approach – although time-consuming – has “the added benefit of initiating a thorough annual review of our holdings.”

AIM also aims to ensure transparency of its methodology to support the standardization of impact reporting by publishing its calculation methods. In 2021, its impact report included data on Scope 1, 2 and 3 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions footprints and savings, alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the weighted average carbon intensity (WACI).

AIM also co-created the Carbon Yield Methodology (CYM) funded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2016 to support the standardization of impact reporting. In 2021, AIM enhanced its own use of CYM by implementing a dynamic baseline leveraging the International Energy Agency (IEA) Stated Policy Scenario (STEPS).

In 2022, AIM plans to integrate the measures of the European Sustainable Financial Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) into all of its portfolio reports – one year ahead of when it is required to do so under the rules. The company is also reporting for the first time on net zero alignment at the project level alongside its existing analysis of avoided emissions.