An ambitious ESG approach
At Anaxis, our ESG approach is strict and ambitious. It applies to all our portfolios, including our emerging market corporate debt fund, making this one of the only funds on the market to offer a responsible approach in this segment.
Ethical management is a strong conviction for Anaxis. Our approach is based on two main pillars: firstly, a rigorous sector exclusion policy, and secondly, a best-in-class policy for sectors that are not excluded through the first filter.
In terms of excluded sectors, our list includes fossil fuels, nuclear power, polluting industries (for example the fertiliser and the insecticide industries), and producers of single-use plastic packaging. We also implement more traditional exclusions affecting the armaments sector, the tobacco sector, and the non-therapeutic use of GMOs.
Strengthening risk management
It should be noted that these criteria for sectoral exclusions do not deprive us of investment opportunities. They reduce the universe by about 16%, which means that among the 700 bonds in the universe, we still have more than 580 different issuers from which to build our portfolio. We therefore retain a great deal of freedom to invest in other sectors offering a wealth of interesting opportunities.
Also, sectors and companies that we exclude for environmental reasons would probably be excluded anyway because of their excessive cyclicality. A prime example of this is the oil sector: as 2020 has shown, it is extremely difficult to predict how prices per barrel will change over the next year or two.
We then apply our best-in-class policy within the sectors that are not excluded, but which nevertheless contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. We do this in such a way as to select the emitters that are the most advanced in terms of the fight against global warming.
All Anaxis portfolios are in line with the trajectory defined by the Paris Agreement. We are aiming for the portfolios to be carbon neutral by 2050. But above all, in the shorter term, we have an objective of reducing the carbon intensity of the portfolios by 7.5% per year over the decade from 2018 to 2028. The carbon intensity of Anaxis’s portfolios has already been reduced by nearly 25% over the last eighteen months. We are therefore ahead of this objective of 7.5% per year and we intend to maintain this trend.
