Global Investors With $6 Trillion Call for CO2-Emission Targets

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| By Jeremy van Loon - Sourced From |

A group of 135 investors including HSBC Holdings Plc and Germany’s DWS Investments that manage more than $6 trillion are calling for binding targets on carbon-dioxide emissions ahead of United Nations talks next month.

They proposed CO2 cuts of as much as 85 percent by 2050 for wealthy countries and said China and India would benefit from adopting emission limits because investors seek regions with stable policies, according to an e-mailed statement from Ethos Foundation, a Swiss activist investor group.

Negotiators from 192 countries will meet in December at a UN conference in Poznan, Poland, to discuss ways to limit greenhouse- gas emissions that contribute to global warming. The talks are aimed at reaching an accord to replace the Kyoto protocol by next year at a conference in Copenhagen.

Global emissions must be cut at least in half by 2050 to avoid an average temperature gain of more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) that would lead to higher sea levels and worse droughts, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.

The money managers, as part of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, the Investor Network on Climate Risk and the Investor Group on Climate Change, favor expanding the use of carbon trading after 2012, when Kyoto expires, as well as increasing investment in low-carbon technologies.

Carbon capture and storage, a technique that extracts carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and stores it underground, is among the promising technologies to help the world move to a low-carbon economy, the group said. Another develops fuels from plant cuttings and biomass known as second-generation biofuels, it said, proposing new technologies be shared with developing countries while maintaining intellectual property rights.

Ethos’ Shareholder Activism

Last September, Geneva-based Ethos said that the foundation created by Swiss pension funds planned to call for shareholders to have a say in the pay of executives at Nestle SA, UBS AG, Credit Suisse Group AG, ABB Ltd. and Novartis AG.

Ethos secured the support of eight pension funds to table motions seeking investor approval of executive and boardmembers’ pay at five of the six biggest companies on the Swiss Market Index. The first vote is due at Novartis’s shareholder meeting in February.