Exercising additional voting rights, integrating ESG criteria (environmental, social, governance) in the securities portfolio and in direct real estate investments: PUBLICA is continuously developing responsible investing.
What has been added in the last few months? Here is an overview:
- Exercising voting rights: PUBLICA has been doing this for a long time with Swiss companies. It is legally obliged to do so. With foreign companies, it has so far been the 150 – 200 companies with which PUBLICA is in dialogue. PUBLICA is now exercising its voting rights with additional companies. Exercising voting rights means applying a voting guideline to express your will in votes. PUBLICA developed this guideline in collaboration with Inrate . Inrate exercises voting rights with Swiss companies on behalf of PUBLICA, with foreign companies it is Minerva Analytics.
- Keyword dialogue: On behalf of PUBLICA, the SVVK-ASIR seeks dialogue with companies that systematically and seriously violate the normative basis, or on issues such as climate. Sometimes dialogue is not successful. In this case, the new concept for responsible investing provides for supporting collaborative investor letters and shareholder proposals or voting against individual board members.
- Coal exclusion expanded: PUBLICA no longer invests in companies on Urgewald ‘s Global Coal Exit List . Unless PUBLICA is already in dialogue with the companies or the companies have a credible coal exit plan.
- ESG indices: PUBLICA has developed tailor-made ESG indices for emerging market government bonds together with FTSE Russell , defining the eligible countries and over- or underweighting them based on ESG criteria.
- There is a reduction path for Swiss real estate to reduce CO2 emissions. PUBLICA has now defined an interim target for 2030: 5.6 kg CO2e/m 2 . PUBLICA is supported in this by Amstein and Walthert.
- SDG: PUBLICA has prioritized four of the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals:
- Goal 7: Affordable and clean energy
- Goal 13: Climate action
- Goal 8: Decent work and economic growth
- Goal 16: Peace, justice and strong institutions.
- With the support of Net Purpose, PUBLICA now records and reports on the contributions of the investments in its portfolio to these four goals.
- For its sustainability report, PUBLICA relies heavily on the ASIP ESG reporting standard and the Swiss Climate Scores. PUBLICA now receives the key figures from MSCI .
