Events for Tuesday, May 13 - Friday, April 25

The systematic integration of environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into investment strategies, and investment decision making across asset classes, has been gaining traction globally.  Asset owners around the world were early adopters of sustainable investment commitments, taking leadership roles—in their capacity as fiduciaries—to advocate for the achievement of long term, sustainable, risk-adjusted returns, consistent with their fiduciary duty.  As noted by CalPERS, the largest public pension fund in the U.S. with a long-term time horizon, “sustainable investment means taking account of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors across all our day-to-day investment business.”

The 4th Annual National Pensions Conference will feature a high-level discussion on the implications of current market conditions and within this context, analyze trends in best practices in investment strategy, risk management and market engagement. In particular, we’ll explore, in detail, the trends towards sustainable investing and allocation to ESG factors at national pension funds, interest in alternatives and other diversification opportunities within the parameters of each organization’s investment mandates and the embedded opportunities & challenges to their long-term capital management philosophy. While the diversity of these funds and their investment practices makes it hard to paint them in the same brushstrokes, National Pension have generally been yield-seeking, long-term investors which have allocated heavily private markets in the last decade. In that setting, the discussion will also focus on each institution’s long-term approach to asset allocation and trends in investment plans including key risks and headways, benchmarks focused on long-term value creation and evaluation of internal and external managers.