ATP targets first direct renewables investment for €1bn emerging markets climate commitment

ATP, the DKR355bn (€48bn) Danish public pension giant, will make its first direct climate change-related investment in emerging markets in the first quarter of 2011 as part of a €1bn commitment made ahead of the Cop15 Copenhagen climate conference in December last year. Ole Beier Sørensen, chief of research and strategy at ATP said the investment would be directly into a renewable energy project, but declined to comment further. ATP has been slow to invest assets as part of its Copenhagen commitment, despite declaring at the time that it wanted to put money to work over as short a space of time as possible in emerging markets.
Sørensen says: “What happened was that we probablynaively anticipated a global agreement that didn’t happen, and along with the continuation of the financial crisis, we had to wait for some pragmatic policy initiatives being put into place and on a more localised basis in emerging markets.” Sørensen, who is also chairman of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, a group of 58 European investors with combined assets of around €5trn, has been a key figure as ATP has taken a leading role in climate change investing. In 2009, the fund made a $400m investment in a global clean tech renewable energy fund run by Hudson Clean Energy Partners.
Link to full interview