ERAFP names five firms for environmental risk and opportunities research mandates

France’s public service additional pension scheme (ERAFP), a 100% SRI investor with €26bn in assets, has announced the winners of its tender for consultancy companies specialised in environmental risk and opportunity research on the theme of climate change.
The research and advisory mandates – for a duration of three years – have been awarded in two buckets.
For the first, measuring the exposure of ERAFP’s equity and bond portfolios to climate change related risks and opportunities, the fund has hired four companies.
They are:

• Trucost, the London-based sustainability data company, which was bought last year by S&P Dow Jones Indices.

• Paris-based I Care&Consult, an environmental consultant founded in 2008 by Guillaume Neveux and Boris Bailly, which was joined last year by Antoine de Salins, a former Executive Director for the €36bn Fonds de réserve pour les Retraites (FRR), to lead their work with investors.

• Grizzly RI, a Paris-based ESG research firm founded by Valéry Lucas-Leclin, formerly one of Europe’s top rated ESG broker analysts who jointly ran Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s (BoAML) sustainability research in London.

• Beyond Ratings, a Paris-based independent macro-financial risk services with a speciality in country and sovereign debt issues, including energy and climate questions.The second mandate is to assist ERAFP with the design of a methodology to measure, analyse and evaluate its exposure to climate change related challenges in its real estate, infrastructure and private equity portfolios. It has been awarded to Paris-based Carbone 4, which was created in 2007 by energy and climate experts Jean-Marc Jancovici and Alain Grandjean and specialises in low carbon strategies.
  In an article last year for RI, ERAFP CEO Philippe Desfossés said one of the fund’s most important challenges for the next ten years was to play a full role in the transition to a carbon-free economy and increase awareness of its action as a responsible pension scheme.
  He said the research mandates would enable the fund to refine its zero-carbon-investor strategy.
  ERAFP is one of the world’s largest public pension funds in terms of member numbers, with over 4.5m beneficiaries, 45,000 employers and nearly €1.8bn in annual contributions, making it one of the fastest growing institutional asset pots in the world, all of which is outsourced to third party managers.