We’ve talked about reporting for faith-consistent investing, it’s part of our FCI Scoring, but with only 46% of faith investment policies and guidelines referencing any type of faith-aligned reporting requirement, and most faith asset owners hesitant to publicly release this information, good examples are hard to find.
Fortunately one good example we cite recently released their annual “sustainable investments” report - Svenska Kyrkan – The Church of Sweden. It’s publicly available, and worth at least a skim.
A few notable observations from this report:
Provides full transparency on asset allocation, investment managers and investment strategies employed
Clarity and connections to Church documentation on how and why the Church defines Sustainability, how it is measured (including specific frameworks and tools), and how investment managers are selected and monitored against this criteria, along with the latest high level summary results and assessment of their measurements.
It’s a short, efficient, yet thorough read, providing enough information to get an overview of activity, and potentially enough to ask follow-on questions.
However, as a public report, it is short on specific and detailed sustainability reporting – with general statements like:
The climate profile in the portfolio is also clearly … in line with the goal of global warming of less than two degrees compared to pre-industrial times.
And:
The portfolio generally exhibits high ratings for sustainability with relatively few serious incidents and other violations of international frameworks.
…unsupported or demonstrated by data or analysis, though the report implies this type of reporting and analysis is done internally and used for monitoring their investment managers.
Finally a note on performance; as you no doubt know, 2022 was a very difficult performance year for just about every asset class relative to the inflation-plus or nominal-return targets most of you have. The Church was not immune to this, with an inflation-plus-3% target, the fund was down 9.5% for the year, only the second underperforming year for the Church in the last 10.