In your work, you focus on sustainable investing. How do you think the crisis has changed the way we look at environmental issues?
Coronavirus has raised awareness of sustainability issues and shown how fragile our world is. Unlike the pandemic, which caught us off guard, the climate crisis is not unexpected. However, we turned a blind eye for a long time. In the meantime, people have become aware that climate change is a threat to our livelihoods and that we need to act boldly and fundamentally change our behavior to achieve net zero by 2050. Tackling climate change is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. And we need the efforts of each and every one.
Do you sense this heightened awareness of sustainability within BlackRock as well?
Absolutely. We observe high demand for sustainable investments. And they’re increasingly coming into focus, off course also because they are performing well. This trend accelerated during the pandemic. As a result, we achieved the performance results of the full year 2020 with our sustainability products as early as the first half of 2021.At BlackRock, we talk about a tectonic shift toward sustainable investing. Furthermore, I think there is an increasing focus around sustainability and increased attention on societal issues like the environment and biodiversity, which have also been strengthened by Covid.As it happens, we broadly communicated our investment beliefs almost at the same time that coronavirus first broke out. For us, we outlined our conviction that sustainability risk especially climate risk – is investment risk. As a result, sustainability has become our investment standard. Since then, we have stringently implemented this strategy.
The summit in Glasgow between October and November 2021 was already the 26th UN climate conference. Hand on heart: do events like this still make any real difference?
Of course. At COP26, participating countries and the business community agreed to work together to advance climate goals on an unprecedented scale. And the financial industry is also on board. Some 450 international financial institutions – banks, insurance companies and pension funds with assets under management of over USD 130 trillion – have pledged to support the fight against climate change and the achievement of net zero targets by 2050. That’s a significant amount of capital and an enormously important step that sends a strong signal.