Sustainable investing has been subject to a lot of attention in recent times, primarily due to growing concerns about the climate crisis.
It's a mega-trend that is here to stay, but for portfolio managers, many of the underlying principles are familiar. "Twenty years ago," says Caroline Shaw, Portfolio Manager of the Fidelity Sustainable Multi Asset fund range, "of course we'd have looked at governance, and of course we'd have looked at what impact a company might have had on the environment or on its supply chain.
"It just wasn't labelled as appropriately as it is now."
It's a case, therefore, of evolution rather than revolution. When it comes to Fidelity International, ESG integration is an important part of the investment process across all strategies, but the firm nevertheless launched the Sustainable Multi Asset range in June 2021 to make that sustainability explicit in a focused product.
One area where there has been substantial change is in the availability of data. "We've got way more data points to look at now, and we've got a lot more insight into companies because disclosure has really ramped up, even at large cap level.
"And in emerging markets, for example, companies are coming to the table for the first time with good disclosure. This is really positive."
