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Numbers on Monitor, Pexels Since 2021, FT Longitude has been conducting a survey of senior professionals working for major institutional investors. The first three waves of the survey focused on investors in Asia, with respondents from Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Korea. Starting in 2023, the survey expanded to 14 countries with respondents from Europe, North America and Australia.
The respondents are senior professionals responsible for investment decisions across insurance, asset management, banks, endowments, hedge funds and pension funds. The purpose of the survey is to better understand how investors think about climate change and the energy sector, and to monitor how their opinions evolve over time by collecting longitudinal data.
The key findings for this wave were:
- Risk perceptions around coal and oil continue to rise: almost 8 in 10 investors see coal as a risky investment, continuing the steady rise seen in previous waves, and nearly half (47%) now see oil as a risky investment, up from 43% last year.
- Despite oil being seen as providing strong returns in the short term, the number of investors saying that they will increase their investment in oil over the next three years continues to be low, down to just 20% of respondents. Meanwhile, 83% expect to increase investment in renewables over the next three years.
- The number of investors who say stakeholders are asking their institution how it intends to tackle climate change has increased to 45% which is a 10-point rise from two years ago.
- Investors are feeling pressure from both sides when it comes to speaking publicly about climate change, as 42% fear criticism for greenwashing or not meeting publicly disclosed climate targets, while the same percentage report being afraid of alienating some of their stakeholders who oppose action on climate change.
All of the data can be viewed and analyzed using the CORE data explorer.