Environmental and ethical issues in asset management

The Fund believes that good ethics and attention to environmental concerns are prerequisites for companies achieving sustainably healthy returns. The Fund believes that active, responsible owners are needed to drive change for the better and induce companies to become more responsible. This applies to both Swedish and foreign companies.

The Fund pursues ESG* integration in asset management, because it ensures risk awareness and capitalises on business opportunities in the area of ESG.

Fund's ESG-related work pursued on several fronts

The Fund's work on environmental and ethical matters is pursued in asset management within the different asset classes by the Fund's corporate governance unit and through the Fund's commitments in the Ethical Council.
>>Read more about the Ethical Council

The Fund's corporate governance unit pursues and coordinates its work relating to ethics, the environment and corporate governance. This work includes pursuing dialogues with companies regarding ESG and exercising corporate governance by voting the Fund's shareholdings at shareholder meetings. The Fund's representatives on the Ethical Council work in the corporate governance unit.

Integrating ESG into asset management

The Fund's different asset classes and management models provide different conditions for how work relating to sustainable value creation (ESG) can be pursued in the context of each management mandate.

Responsibility for integration work, with the goal of fully integrating ESG into management, lies with each management unit. The management unit reports on the integration work to the business manager and CEO. The work is pursued in close collaboration with the corporate governance unit, which is responsible, for instance, for conducting dialogues with companies regarding ESG.  

Another step forward

The different management units have, in the past year, taken a further step in their work aimed at integrating environmental and ethical issues into asset management to an even higher degree. In the autumn of 2011, the work of the asset management in this area was presented in the Fund's Corporate Governance Report 2011.  

Read more about ESG in AP4's asset management in
>>Corporate governance report 2012 

* ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) is often the term used for issues pertaining to the environment, ethics and corporate governance.