Sarasin & Partners LLP
Sarasin & Partners is a limited liability partnership registered in England and Wales as a global asset manager headquartered in London. It joined the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative on 11 December 2020 and its initial target disclosure was published on 1 November 2021.
Percentage of assets covered by the Net Zero Asset Managers Commitment Statement
71% of total AUM (USD $19.93 billion)
Information on interim target(s) covering the proportion of assets to be managed in line with net zero
Baseline(s):
Portfolio decarbonisation reference baseline
2019 is the baseline year against which we track our emission reductions.
Target(s):
Portfolio decarbonisation reference target
Our target is a 50% reduction of real-world emissions, normalised for sector/geographic exposure by 2030. We will measure emissions intensity (tCO2e/$ revenue or tCO2e/EVIC) to track emissions performance.
GHG scopes included:
We will include Scope 1 & 2, and Scope 3 when reliable data is made available.
Methodology:
Net Zero Investment Framework
Scenario(s):
We will measure holdings’ emissions reduction pathways against 1.5°C science-based pathways, such as those offered by SBTi.
Additional information
Proportion of AUM committed:
We will extend our Net Zero approach to cover 100% of our fully discretionary (both investment and stewardship) AUM by 2025. AUM excluded from the NZAM initiative consist of:
• non-discretionary assets (and including assets subject to restricted mandates, e.g. capital gain tax)
• assets for which we do not have stewardship oversight (e.g. voting and engagement)
• small holdings held outside our core strategies.
Together these account for c23% of our AUM, as of 31 August 2021. All (100%) of highrisk holdings covered by our AUM commitment (71% in 2022 rising to 100% discretionary AUM by 2025) will be subject to our engagement and climate voting policy.
Policy on coal and other fossil fuel investments:
Yes, in keeping with our broader commitment, all high-risk sectors will be subject to our targets for emission reductions in line with SBTi. We have explicitly committed to avoid providing fresh capital for fossil fuel extraction or energy generation principally powered by fossil fuels, unless they are an engagement target with clear time-bound Paris-alignment objective. This includes investment in any new issue of shares or bonds. We further commit not to purchase such bonds in the secondary market.
In keeping with our NZAM commitment, the above will apply to 71% fully discretionary AUM from 2022, rising to 100% AUM by 2025.
This policy will be published in our NZAM Action Plan in November 2021.
Further information:
Alignment assessment and engagement: A central tenet of our target approach is a focus on reducing real world emissions, rather than creating the impression of emission reduction through divestment. Therefore, we plan to use a rolling threeyear average, or allow for a divergence range around the central pathway in any specific year, to permit us to focus on bringing down real-world emissions through active engagement.
All of our core holdings (on any of our internal buy lists that populate all our strategies) in the covered AUM will be subject to our Paris-alignment methodology – which means all entities in high-risk categories will be classified as either aligned, or we will be engaging & voting to deliver alignment.
We will be assessing the financed emissions embedded in our holdings by reference to SBTi pathways, which are in turn benchmarked to the IPCC scenarios. We will focus our engagement work on the high-risk sectors identified by the TPI, CA100+ Focus list and also include banks and real estate. We will keep this priority list under review to ensure we expand the scope in line with evolving data and understanding of new risk categories.
In line with the NZIF, we apply a climate ‘materiality’ threshold to focus our energies on those entities with the highest emissions profiles. To do this we look for:
• High impact sectors – these include both sectors that have high direct emissions (Scope 1 & 2), but also those that are linked to high emissions activities (Scope 3). We use the Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI) high impact sectors as a guide, adding in banks and real estate.
• High impact companies – in certain instances, we find individual companies have high carbon footprints outside the high impact sectors. To ensure we do not miss these, we screen our holdings for the CA100+ focus list – see https://www. climateaction100.org/whos-involved/companies/
Sarasin plan to publish a Net Zero Action Plan in Nov 2021.