Carbon Tracker expands team in bid to increase investor influence

Carbon Tracker is adding an investor outreach role to its team in a bid to move to increase its influence over institutional investors.

The London-based NGO is recruiting a Head of Institutional Investor Engagement and Outreach to promote its research to “decision-makers in the capital markets” – with a focus on energy investment analysts and managers.

The candidate will develop relationships with financial institutions, primarily in the UK and EU, but potentially further afield and identify tools that could be based on Carbon Tracker’s analytics. They will have to create a record of “investor positions on climate risk” and establish a database of investors in the fossil-fuel majors, in order to target them with research on those companies.

“The goal of this job is to educate and work with capital market practitioners to improve their understanding of climate risk and how it might affect the financial case for the energy sector,” Carbon Tracker said. “It will be about embedding the Carbon Tracker narrative into mainstream investment decision making processes.”Mark Campanale, Carbon Tracker’s executive director, told RI it was not moving into research sales: “We’re not selling anything, and we’re not developing a brokerage house or anything remotely like that,” he said.

“This is about upping our game in terms of communication more than anything – we want to standardise our responses to the investment community, in order to be more efficient and expand our reach.”

The organisation is also recruiting a fixed-income analyst to bolster its work on the implications for the debt-side of a global transition to a low-carbon economy.

“This will form a new programme of research producing analysis across relevant asset classes to understand the risks of stranded assets and the opportunities in new energy markets,” the vacancy says, adding: “This will involve working with financial partners on alternative methodologies and ratings systems.”

The candidate will be part of a team developing the programme, reviewing existing methodologies and looking at the implications of the energy transition on credit ratings.