CalSTRS has been integrating climate change into its portfolio for decades, but the strategy took a leap forward in 2021 when the pension fund adopted a 2050 net zero commitment that included an interim goal to reduce emissions from the portfolio by 50 per cent by 2030.

Kirsty Jenkinson, investment director for the sustainable investment and stewardship strategies at the pension fund, was initially sceptical of whether a net zero target would be the right approach. Two years in, she is convinced it has provided a new level of focus and anchor to climate investment at the $325.9 billion pension fund for California’s teachers.

Net zero is now one of the pension fund’s core strategic priorities, sitting alongside its 7 per cent return hurdle, benchmark investment and commitment to DEI. It has allowed the 220-person investment branch overseeing a complex, multi-asset class portfolio to align under one goal.

“Having a common shared goal, even though it is many years out, can’t be underestimated when you are a large allocator with multiple different strategies,” she says.

Measuring and reducing emissions

One of the three tenets in CalSTRS’ net zero pledge is to measure and reduce emissions. CalSTRS is in the process of allocating 20 per cent of its listed equity allocation to a low carbon index that could reduce portfolio emissions by 14 per cent. The strategy is being implemented over the cycle and allows the passive investor to reduce emissions in a way that also meets its risk parameters by limiting the level of active risk.

Following board approval in May 2023, the team extended emissions reduction to fixed income, targeting a 12 per cent reduction in emissions in corporate credit also via a bespoke index.

“Corporate credit accounts for a significant amount of our fixed income so we are focusing on the priority allocation,” says Jenkinson.

Both CalSTRS public equity and corporate credit portfolios are around 50 per cent aligned with a 2-degrees scenario, and about 20 per cent aligned with a 1.5-degrees scenario.

One of the biggest challenges is accessing emissions data and tracking emissions reduction at a company level to a total portfolio level.

“The data we get on emissions doesn’t pipe into the financial tools we use to govern the whole portfolio,” says Jenkinson. CalSTRS is working with MSCI to try and bridge the gap and measure and manage net zero public market emissions exposure and reduction efforts.

Elsewhere Jenkinson is using CalSTRS influence with external managers to try and improve emissions data and analysis coming into the fund, particularly the hedge funds in the risk mitigation portfolio.

“We have interesting partners that are helping educate us,” she says. “We can use our influence as a client to see how we can progress.”

Emissions reduction in private markets is more challenging. CalSTRS uses the GRESBY framework to track emissions in its direct and externally managed real estate allocations. In private equity and infrastructure, the team is developing an internal classification to determine the trajectory or pathway of an asset from grey to olive and green.

SISS solutions

The challenges of reducing emissions in private market is one of the reasons the pension fund is using private markets to home in on opportunities.

“It’s worked well for us to have a focus on emission reductions and climate solutions,” she says.

Investing in opportunities got a boost in 2021 when CalSTRS launched a new sustainable investment and stewardship strategies private portfolio (SISS) targeting climate investment opportunities across private equity, real estate, and inflation sensitive assets particularly.

The portfolio which has already hit $2 billion (although it’s not all fully invested) benefits from steadfast commitment from the leadership and board, despite heightened liquidity concerns at a total fund level because of the macro environment.

“The portfolio is directionally supported by our leadership and board,” she says.

Of the portfolio’s two sleeves, one involves scaling investments with existing external managers. The other allows staff to develop new investment partnerships that allows capital to flow across assets and the risk spectrum, from infrastructure to venture and into structures that sit between the risk return hurdles of the asset classes, typically a difficult fit because of underlying benchmark or other considerations.

The platform also allows investments in spun-out, first-time funds, with new players and different structures in a specific departure from CalSTRS typical investment with established partners. It is allowing the pension fund to tap into evolving, fast-moving investments and expand its expertise in the intersection between risk-adjusted returns and climate change drivers.

“We felt we needed to be open to building new structures with new players who understand the policy, technology and physics of the transition.”

Asset allocation modelling

In another development, CalSTRS is integrating climate scenarios into its asset liability modelling study, which guides asset allocation and is updated every four years. Since there is no fit-for-purpose way to pipe climate risk into the asset allocation, the process involves estimation and trial and error, she says.

“The architecture is still being built.”

Furthermore, as the team tries to understand the interplay between risk, return and emissions, they hope to build a better understanding of where the market is moving regarding emissions, physical and transition risk. From this they will be able to calibrate what risk CalSTRS is prepared to take versus the market.

“It’s a new concept, and we don’t have perfect answers.”

CalSTRS is not happy taking significant active risk, yet the team doesn’t’ know how much active risk they are taking by putting in place net zero strategies to reduce emissions and investing in climate solutions, she continues.

“I do worry about this, and because there is no visibility on how the market is pricing risk, we have to assume it may respond at the last moment, when the crisis happens.”

“We are very used to understanding where, say, inflation is going, but the market has no way to calibrate emissions. We don’t have a clear way of saying emissions are doing this and physical risk is doing this and therefore we need to be aware of this,” she says.

Jenkinson concludes that climate investment also brings considerable change management. It requires building different and enhanced skills, yet the topics are diverse and rapidly changing.

“Not everyone follows climate policy, and nor should they have to. Physics, science, and policy expertise doesn’t exist in every team. We are spending lots of time on how to work smarter – how to skill-up is really important.”

We’re witnessing a dramatic transformation of the US utility sector, driven largely by climate change and the swift advancement of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI). Rising infrastructure costs and the push toward renewable energy are shaking up traditional investment models that depend on fossil fuels.

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A recent paper “Innovation Unleashed: The Rise of the Total Portfolio Approach” published by the Chartered Alternative Investment Association proposes a new approach to institutional investment that replaces asset class benchmarks with total portfolio outcomes. Hallmarks of the process include measuring success based on total fund returns rather than relative value in relation to benchmarks, and using factors to achieve diversification rather than asset classes.

Canada’s CPP Investments’ Derek Walker and Geoffrey Rubin, two contributing authors of the paper which includes insights from Australia’s Future Fund, New Zealand Superannuation Fund and GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, provide specific detail of their factor approach in one section of the paper.

“We believe the factor-based approach, when implemented thoughtfully, provides greater transparency to underlying portfolio drivers and more effective tools for portfolio management,” write Walker and Rubin.

“A total portfolio approach is critical to how we at CPP Investments contribute to the sustainability of CPP,” they explain, continuing that diversification is the most important lever to control risks and influence returns, and looking at assets through a factor lens helps achieve a well-diversified portfolio.

Broad asset class labels like equities or real estate do not sufficiently capture the underlying drivers that influence the risk and return of investments, but analysing the more fundamental and more independent return-risk factors that underlie each investment strategy can. CPP Investments considers return-risk factors like economic growth, rates and credit spreads, they continue – for example, private equity is considered “high intensity” exposure to economic growth.

CPP Investments total portfolio investment framework (TPIF) reflects the full scope of investment activity at the fund. Underpinning these components is a factor view of the portfolio. At a high level, the TPIF framework consists of the following components:

Firstly, it involves setting risk targets drawn from information including the actuarial report and the investor’s own own internal risk and return expectations to estimate and express the level of market risk.

Secondly, the process involves setting exposure targets, determining the mix of factor exposures that maximises risk-adjusted return over a long horizon, robust to different macroeconomic environments.

Next the team set strategy targets. This involves modelling and mapping investment strategies onto the factor set – these representations are then consistently used through TPIF.

For example, modelling will capture different characteristics of the asset class like the fact real assets such as property and infrastructure both have exposure to economic growth and rates, while private and public investments may appear to be fundamentally similar, but their liquidity profile is materially different as are their leverage and debt levels. In this stage of the process, the team also recognise the additional expected risk and returns of active management.

The final step of the process draws together strategic allocation with day-to- day management. Using the factor lens, the team analyse how major new investments or divestments might affect the exposures of the total portfolio. “As markets and security prices change, we use our passive holdings of public market securities to rebalance our portfolios and seek to avoid unintended factor and risk exposures.”

TPIF also separates the management of foreign currency exposures from the management of the underlying assets. This permits the team to target the distinct return risk drivers of currencies.

Complexity challenges

The factor-based approach brings additional challenges above and beyond a traditional asset class-based approach. These include complexity, the risk of model error, and vulnerabilities to shifting macroeconomic relationships. Using factors to model private assets is challenging, and there are also limits on precision and robustness of the strategy, they write.

However, the duo argue that as we move to a less certain world, investors need to continue to evolve factor-based investment frameworks. Increased and more volatile inflation and emerging risks like climate change – like the need for analysis on the sensitivity of return on capital allocation choices to different climate change pathways – and geopolitical instability, are now coming to the fore.

“We believe that consideration of these types of emerging factors at the strategic allocation level and in the service of building a more resilient portfolio is important for institutional investors with diversified global portfolios.

We believe the factor-based approach when implemented thoughtfully provides greater transparency to underlying portfolio drivers and more effective tools for portfolio management.”

Listing key lessons, they write:

  • Establish a prudent and appropriate market risk appetite.
  • Determine the return/risk factors relevant to your program.
  • Map each investment strategy to your risk factor set.
  • Build and rebalance your portfolio based upon optimal factor exposures, not asset classes.
  • Consider adding new factors as the markets evolve.

Like many sustainability-focused investors, $17 billion PenSam, one of Denmark’s largest labour market pension providers, has found itself overweight US tech stocks in recent years. Not only is technology a low emitting sector, it’s also producing many of the solutions for reducing emissions by creating efficiency of production.

“We had more than 10 per cent in the IT sector,” recalls Mikael Bek, head of ESG at PenSam which introduced a climate benchmark for the equity portfolio in 2020. Over the last three years, the index successfully reduced carbon and supported positive returns in the equity allocation, but had also developed an increasing tilt to the IT sector where stocks like Amazon and Microsoft dominate the equity markets and take up a large share of the index.

“This was not the idea of the benchmark – we wanted a market portfolio with a climate tilt,” says Bek.

To resolve the problem, PenSam has just introduced a new, sector neutral climate index developed with S&P and applied to the whole $7-8 billion equity portfolio.

The index is constructed around a defined level of carbon budget linked to UN IPCC estimates on the required emission reductions to limit global warming to 1.5ºC compared to pre-industrial levels. Broadly, the benchmark has a 70 per cent reduction in emissions compared to the parent benchmark and must also further reduce carbon emissions annually by 7 per cent. If companies cannot achieve this themselves, PenSam “will make changes in the benchmark to reach its goal,” says Bek.

Alongside weighting companies in the index according to how much they cut their emissions, the bespoke index includes a higher weighting to companies having a positive climate impact. “Decarbonization is moving too slowly if we are going to reach the Paris goals. Just look out of the window! Everyone wants to continue to live the same life and emissions reduction is a very difficult task.”

The only caveat to the sector neutral approach is a large underweight to the energy sector – energy accounts for just 0.5 per cent of the index compared to 5 per cent in the underlying, broad-based benchmark. That underweight has been passed or redistributed to other sectors, he says.

“Our underweight to the energy sector is deliberate because we believe the fossil fuel sector will have problems in the long-run. We say we have a time horizon of 20-30 years ago and we need to reduce our exposure to fossil fuels,” says Bek.

In another element, the bespoke index also includes exclusions to tobacco and controversial weapon groups. Companies with poor human and labour rights are also taken out of the index.

PenSam also has a bespoke index for its corporate bond allocation that includes an exclusion on fossil fuels.  But the investor is currently exploring developing the index further, seeking a climate benchmark for the bond portfolio.

Challenges reporting on climate

Climate reporting and conforming to new regulation is one of the most challenging elements of sustainability at PenSam. In 2025/2026 the investor will report emissions in its audited, annual report for the first time. “When something goes in your annual report it is audited, that’s serious and this is a new ball game that informs our licence to operate” he says.

The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, CSRD, require large and listed companies report on the social and environmental risks they face and on how their activities impact people and the environment. Pension funds have to comply with both CSDR and Sustainability Financial Disclosure Regulation, SFDR, concludes Bek.

Many European and UK asset owners have pulled their allocation to hedge funds in recent years, unsure what multiple strategies with different outcomes are trying to achieve or if hedge funds really do capitalize on bull markets and protect them in a downturn.

But the TfL Pension Fund, the open scheme for workers across London’s transport network, remains firmly committed  to hedge funds in its £14 billion portfolio where a 13.6 per cent allocation to liquid alternatives allows the fund to tap the one free lunch in investment – diversification.

“We are a bit unique in this space,” Padmesh Shukla, chief investment officer at TfL Pension Fund, told Top1000funds.com.

The fund uses hedge funds to diversify equity beta risk – and to some extent rates and credit risk – in a strategy based on key principles encapsulated in three allocations. A premium bucket comprises classic alternative risk premiums where the Fund refuses to pay 2:20 fees.

“Why pay for returns if they are correlated to equity beta in the book?” says Shukla. “We are not going to pay for a levered version of beta. Not everything deserves a 2:20 structure.”

He is prepared to pay for clearly defined, uncorrelated pure alpha, however. This second program comprises macro, discretionary, systematic and some multi strategy and relative value strategies that are impossible to recreate elsewhere.

A third, satellite element to the book comprises niche strategies that are less scalable and allocations with much smaller ticket sizes than the premium or core allocations. These strategies may be with emerging managers for example and must have a low correlation to strategies in the other buckets to ensure diversification across the whole book.

Other pillars to the allocation include governance support and robust backing from the top. When the long only equity beta format posts three times the return and trustees question value for money, the team will face difficult questions.

Validation for the allocation was most notable in 2022 when no matter what investors held, everything from globally diversified equity, bonds, and credit, was down. Shukla recalls that although the fund suffered on the long side, it held its assets under management flat, thanks to hedge funds.

“When everything wobbled, the hedge funds portfolio, with its left tail risk construct provided the much-needed ballast for the Fund.”

Cutting out carbon

Shukla is currently focused on reducing and measuring carbon emissions in the hedge fund allocation in line with the fund’s introduction of a net zero strategy in 2021. When hedge funds have a physical exposure to bonds and equities, he notices encouraging progress capturing carbon.

For example, UK-based equity hedge fund The Children’s Investment Fund Management, a long-only equity hedge fund, uses standard templates for reporting. It is successfully pursuing net zero targets through voting and clear engagement initiatives and is never shy in expressing its displeasure where the progress is unsatisfactory, he says.

“ESG and net zero is in the DNA of the fund; they are also doing great work around engagement with companies.”

Still, outside public markets despite “positive” progress that is “worth our effort” he notes making headway is slower. Many hedge funds are intangible by nature, comprising wide-ranging synthetic exposure via futures and options to FX, rates, commodities, and credit like the Fund’s large book in macro and trend.

Working out what to measure, and how, is difficult.

“In these cases, we are working with managers and the industry more widely to understand if the right metrics are being included and reported. We need a regulatory regime to flow through to managers across jurisdictions.”

Shukla continues that in some places it’s “fairly easy” to identify where there is not direct carbon exposure in synthetic allocations – for example US rates. But in others, like commodities, it gets more complex. Carbon exposure in short allocations where investors have taken an active stance on not owning a company is another thorny area.

“If you are invested in a long-short strategy in equity or credit and you are running a net short book, does that mean you can book [the carbon] benefit of being short in view of long positions?”

He adds that accurately measuring emissions in hedge funds is still a balancing act as investors strive to neither under nor over report. He doesn’t want to rely on technicalities or leave questions unanswered, but is also wary of issues like double counting or using revenue as a measure of emissions.

“We want to be sure where we are making real progress. It is about being consistent and pragmatic.”

Other sources of diversification

Diversification doesn’t only come via hedge funds. Other allocations like re-insurance, where the fund has invested for the last ten years, and emerging markets, are important sources. For example re-insurance, where the fund has a $300 million allocation via separate accounts rather than pooled funds to better tailor the allocation to its own time horizon and risk appetite, is the only investment that is not driven by the economic cycle, says Shukla.

“Reinsurance is an act of God and you can’t find a better diversifying asset.”

The fund’s investment in re-insurance is global and across the spectrum, including private markets. He doesn’t give managers a return target, instead the allocation is wholly risk driven.

“We set the risk the manager can take, and from that they build a globally diversified re-insurance book.”

The same principles of diversification and robust rationale underscore the allocation to emerging markets, another corner of the portfolio that distinguishes the fund from peers, more so given emerging markets haven’t been a great story recently.

“With hindsight, the best market to be invested in is the US. But emerging markets provide one of the highest equity risk premiums, so we are not looking to unwind our exposure. It is consistent with our long-term investment thesis.”

Despite his enthusiasm for emerging market public and private equity, debt, infrastructure, and hedge funds, he avoids private credit. Uncertainties around the rule of law and bankruptcy processes in developing countries can leave investors out of pocket, particularly given private credit investors’ position in the capital structure can impinge their ability to enforce security.

Going with the ebb and flow

In recent years, Shukla has gradually reduced the equity allocation and increased the allocation to alternatives where investments include private credit and private equity (where he notices interesting opportunities starting to appear as co-investor and in the secondary market) infrastructure, and re-insurance.

Paring back and building out the different portfolios has come in response to the ebbs and flows of the market – like building out private credit off the back of changes in spreads, for example.

“The market will always throw opportunity at you, and we use dislocations or out of favour sectors to pick up the pieces and build our long term strategic asset allocation.”

The market certainly threw opportunity the fund’s way when long term UK real rates surged during last year’s LDI crisis. Although it was a painful experience for many UK pension funds with large exposure to government bonds, the Fund has been a net beneficiary.

Shukla went into the LDI crisis with a low hedge ratio of around 8 per cent, and when real rates moved from nearly -4 per cent during peak COVID to +2 per cent (currently +1-1.5 per cent), he used the swing to increase the hedge ratio to around 33 per cent. Combined with proxy hedges via investments where the payout is linked to inflation, the portfolio is currently hedged around 40 per cent.

“For a fund that is still open to new members, that is quite a significant amount,” he says. “Long term real rates really are the best deal on the table and we have leveraged this in the context of our LDI strategy,” he says.

The fund has 25 manager relationships with close to 45 mandates, meaning some managers run multiple mandates. “We try to not have too many mandates with too many different managers. We aim to have meaningful partnership where we have high conviction to get the trade-off right between over-diversification and too much concentration.”

All management is outsourced leaving the internal team – around eight- focused on strategy and risk management, compliance, sustainability, reporting communication and technology. The entire portfolio sits on Aladdin which helps the team lever up its understanding of risk in the book, across all the assets.

The UK’s Smart Pension already exceeds £5 billion and is one of the fastest growing defined contribution Master Trusts in the country. Launched in 2014 it serves more than 1.4 million members and more than 70,000 employers in the UK. It receives regular contribution inflows of £1 billion annually and anticipates doubling within three years.

“Smart Pension was initially launched in response to the UK Government’s change to make it a legal requirement for UK businesses to set up and contribute into a workplace pension plan for their employees,” Paul Bucksey, chief investment officer of Smart Pension tells Top1000funds.com.

Alongside organic growth, Smart Pension has expanded through a string of strategic consolidations. In July 2023 it acquired Evolve Pensions, a leading provider of UK workplace pension services. This acquisition was the latest in a consolidation strategy which now includes nine former master trusts.

Bucksey predicts that consolidation in the UK DC landscape will continue, moving from around 1,800 single employer trusts and 35 master trusts today to just “hundreds” of single employer trusts and “about 15 master trusts” in the next five years. “The number of master trusts will reduce considerably, and the UK government and regulators are pushing towards that.”

“The workplace pension marketplace is changing fast, and master trusts are key drivers of that change. More and more employers in the UK are using these simple and effective retirement savings structures to reduce risk, lower costs, improve oversight and upgrade the investment options available to their employees. They offer significant potential benefits to both employers and members,” he continues.

Bucksey argues that winning market share depends on delivering better value for savers. Size and efficiency are important but a leap forward in technology is also essential. Much of the industry is still underpinned by clunky and expensive 20th century IT systems, amplifying risk and frustrating  opportunities to create value for employers and members, he argues.

“We offer a number of investment options our members can use if they wish to make their own investment decisions, but most use one of our managed strategies where we automatically move them as they get older into asset classes that are more aligned with how they may choose to access their pension savings. These changes begin to be made when a member is eight years from their selected retirement age.”

evolving Investment strategies

The Smart Sustainable Growth fund (used in the growth phase of the most popular managed strategy) has a typical bundled charge of 0.30 per annum.

“The asset allocation of the Smart Sustainable Growth fund is 80 per cent in equities, 10 per cent in fixed income and 10 per cent in private credit. When setting the asset allocation, we are looking to optimise returns for our members against volatility and cost,” Bucksey says.

He explains that within the equity bucket, Smart Pension has focused on reducing emissions and has also allocated to a biodiversity strategy. Similarly, the fixed income bucket is invested in green bonds.

“We are reviewing the asset allocation and may increase the allocation to equities slightly,” he says.

“Our technology allows us to keep our administration costs down which in turn allows us to spend proportionally more on investments than most of our competitors. In addition to integrating more expensive ESG components into our investments, we’ve also been investing 10 per cent of the Smart Sustainable Growth fund in a private credit strategy for almost three years now.”

Bucksey adds that investing in illiquid assets will improve returns for members and provide greater diversification going forward. “We are actively looking at private renewable infrastructure as well as private equity right now, and I would expect that we will be investing in these asset classes by the beginning of next year.”

“Having very strong recurring inflows enables us to invest in longer term and less liquid assets already. As our AUM gets closer to £10 billion, we expect to be able to invest on a direct basis which should provide us with additional opportunities that aren’t currently possible using pooled funds.”

Technoligical advancement

Bucksey argues that as the UK pensions industry faces transformative shifts due to the Mansion House reforms and the exploration of a ‘pot for life’ model, the imperative for technological advancement has never been more pronounced.

For pension providers, this means prioritising technological upgrades not just for compliance, but to effectively reduce administration costs and deliver higher quality investment solutions and an improved customer experience.

The winners and the consolidators will be those that embrace and invest in their underlying technology ahead of the inevitable changes that are coming, not only to avoid passing higher entry costs to members but also to help ensure the industry is equipped for the demands of a rapidly evolving financial landscape, where both efficiency and adaptability will be key to success.

“We’re uniquely positioned to deliver on this. Right now many of our industry’s best improvements are coming from digital solutions and master trusts,” he concludes.