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Orsted wind farm off Great Britain: The Danish electricity supplier relies heavily on renewable energies
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The Deutsche Bank subsidiary DWS is committed to investing all of its managed assets, currently more than 700 billion euros, in a climate-neutral way by 2050 at the latest.
According to SPIEGEL information, the Frankfurt fund company is participating in the new "Net Zero Asset Managers" initiative, which is due to start this Friday.
30 major investors, including the asset management companies of the major Swiss bank UBS and the French insurance group AXA, as well as fund giants such as Fidelity International, Schroders and Wellington want to jointly commit to the “net zero” target.
That means: The companies in their portfolios are not allowed to emit more greenhouse gases than they remove from the atmosphere.
Together, the 30 participants in the initiative manage more than $ 9,000 billion.
»Combating climate change is an indisputable necessity.
Those who oppose it will lose, "said DWS boss Asoka Wöhrmann at the request of SPIEGEL.
"As a fiduciary asset manager, it is our mission to pave the way to a carbon-free economy."
Global energy transition as a business opportunity
With the initiative, the financial groups are responding to the advancing climate crisis - which threatens their own business models.
For example, holdings in oil or coal multinationals could suddenly devalue if their promotional projects were to be stopped because of their harmful effects on the climate.
Insurance companies fear that they will have to pay ever higher damage payments for natural disasters.
"If companies fail to make tangible progress, we will exclude them from our investment universe."
Asoka Wöhrmann, DWS boss
At the same time, a global transformation towards a low-emission world economy opens up many high-yield investment opportunities.
At the moment, for example, the shares of European electricity suppliers that rely heavily on renewable energies and thus generate high returns are booming.
Last year twelve of the world's largest insurers and pension funds, including Munich Allianz, founded a similar platform.
Such alliances put pressure on companies that are dependent on the capital of large investors to make their business model more sustainable.
Doubts about the sustainability promise
This is exactly what the 30 signatories of the new initiative want to work towards.
"We will work on behalf of our investment clients so that companies finally take sustainability seriously," promised DWS boss Wöhrmann.
"And if companies that have some catching up to do fail to make tangible progress, we will exclude them from our investment universe."
However, some financial groups still lack the much-invoked sustainability in their current business operations.
It has just been announced that DWS parent Deutsche Bank and Allianz are supporting the operators of some of the world's most damaging oil, coal and gas projects: with loans and investments in the billions.
In order for the “Net Zero Asset Managers” to actually implement their long-term vows for 2050, the participants in the initiative undertake to set interim goals for themselves.
Those for 2030, for example, should be based on a scenario from the IPCC.
It provides for a 50 percent reduction in CO2 emissions in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The interim targets of the major investors are to be reviewed every five years - with the aim of ensuring that all companies in their portfolios are climate-neutral by 2050 at the latest.
"The fact that 30 of the world's leading asset managers are committed to the net zero target by 2050 can tip the balance: towards the global transition of the economy to climate neutrality," says Stephanie Pfeifer, head of the London Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, which the Coordinated initiative.
“It's action, it's not just words.” DWS and its fellow campaigners now have to prove this.
With action.
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