Achieving carbon neutrality by 2060 will require radical changes. Formidable challenges lie ahead, but also investment opportunities with renewables, electric vehicles and energy storage set to benefit. 

Speaker

Jie Lu is Head of Investments China in the Asia Pacific team. Before joining Robeco in 2015, he worked at Norges Bank Investment Management as a Portfolio Manager in Shanghai from 2011 to 2015, and as an Analyst in Hong Kong from 2009 to 2011. Prior to that, he worked at the M&A department of Morgan Stanley Asia. Jie started his career at Motorola in 2000 and is a native Mandarin Chinese speaker. He holds an MBA with Distinction in Finance and Marketing from Northwestern University in the US. He also holds a Master’s in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Illinois and a Bachelor’s in Biochemistry from Fudan University in China.

Moderator

Professor Kotkin received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988, and has been a professor at Princeton since 1989. He is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
At Princeton Professor Kotkin teaches courses in geopolitics, modern authoritarianism, global history, and Soviet Eurasia, and has won all of the university’s teaching awards. He has served as the vice dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and chaired the editorial committee of Princeton University Press. Outside Princeton, he writes essays and reviews for Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other publications, and was the regular book reviewer for the New York Times Sunday Business section for many years. He serves as an invited consultant to defence ministries and intelligence agencies in multiple countries. His latest book is Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 (Penguin, 2017). His previous book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Investor Response

Poll results

Do you expect China’s pledge to carbon neutrality to result in an intensification of the tech war between China and the US, given the likely scramble for new technologies that will be needed to make the energy transition?

The challenge for infrastructure asset managers to achieve Net Zero by 2050 is immense. It requires detailed strategic planning, clear interim targets, critical investment, transparent insight and regular reporting, as well as strong leadership and clear governance frameworks. And all of this needs to be done inside a fiduciary responsibility to seek superior long-term net returns for investors and their beneficiaries.

Speakers

David is IFM Investors’ chief executive, responsible for executing the firm’s strategy and delivering strong results for IFM Investors’ clients, shareholders and staff. He leads IFM’s global business, with nine offices and four investment teams: infrastructure, debt investments, listed equities and private equity. Neal joined IFM Investors from the Future Fund, Australia’s sovereign wealth fund, which he joined in 2007 as its inaugural chief investment officer before becoming the chief executive in 2014. At the Future Fund, he established the investment team and built and designed the fund’s investment model. Prior to joining the Future Fund, he spent 15 years with Willis Towers Watson, where he started his career in the UK. He went on to establish and lead the firm’s investment consulting business in Australia. As head of investment consulting at Willis Towers Watson Australia, he led the team providing advisory services to the Future Fund when it was established in 2006.

Moderator

White is responsible for the content across all Conexus Financial’s institutional media and events. She is responsible for directing the bi-annual Fiduciary Investors Symposium which challenges global investors on investment best practice and aims to place the responsibilities of investors in wider societal, and political contexts, as well as promote the long-term stability of markets and sustainable retirement incomes. She is the editor of conexust1f.flywheelstaging.com, the online news and analysis site for the world’s largest institutional investors. White has been an investment journalist for more than 20 years and has edited industry journals including Investment & Technology, Investor Weekly and MasterFunds Quarterly. She was previously editorial director of InvestorInfo and has worked as a freelance journalist for the Australian Financial Review, CFO, Asset and Asia Asset Management. She has a Bachelor of Economics from Sydney University and a Master of Arts in Journalism from the University of Technology, Sydney. She was previously a columnist for the Canadian publication, Corporate Knights, which is distributed by the Globe and Mail and The Washington Post. White is currently a fellow in the Finance Leaders Fellowship at the Aspen Institute. The two-year program consists of 22 fellows and seeks to develop the next generation of responsible, community-spirited leaders in the global finance industry.

With a massive, nationwide effort the United States could reach net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050 using existing technology and at costs aligned with historical spending on energy. Research from the High Meadows Environmental Institute plots a Blueprint for the next decade showing the key is overcoming execution challenges including the infrastructure deployment and the mobilisation of capital and labour. This session examined the implications for investors.

Click here to view Chris’s slides

Speaker

Chris Greig is the Theodora D. ’78 & William H. Walton III ’74 Senior Research Scientist in the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. An entrepreneur and former CEO with extensive industry experience, Grieg conceived the Rapid Switch Initiative, a major international, interdisciplinary research effort that aims to accelerate progress on climate change by identifying and resolving the critical bottlenecks that slow our progress towards deep decarbonisation.

Moderator

Professor Kotkin received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988, and has been a professor at Princeton since 1989. He is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
At Princeton Professor Kotkin teaches courses in geopolitics, modern authoritarianism, global history, and Soviet Eurasia, and has won all of the university’s teaching awards. He has served as the vice dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and chaired the editorial committee of Princeton University Press. Outside Princeton, he writes essays and reviews for Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other publications, and was the regular book reviewer for the New York Times Sunday Business section for many years. He serves as an invited consultant to defence ministries and intelligence agencies in multiple countries. His latest book is Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 (Penguin, 2017). His previous book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Investor Response

Will there be a sustainable politics of sustainability? Professor Stephen Kotkin examined the politics of sustainability and the importance of transparency, measurement and compliance so that greenwashing does not prevail.

Speaker

Professor Kotkin received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988, and has been a professor at Princeton since 1989. He is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
At Princeton Professor Kotkin teaches courses in geopolitics, modern authoritarianism, global history, and Soviet Eurasia, and has won all of the university’s teaching awards. He has served as the vice dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and chaired the editorial committee of Princeton University Press. Outside Princeton, he writes essays and reviews for Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other publications, and was the regular book reviewer for the New York Times Sunday Business section for many years. He serves as an invited consultant to defence ministries and intelligence agencies in multiple countries. His latest book is Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 (Penguin, 2017). His previous book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Moderator

Tate has been an investment industry media publisher and conference producer since 1996. In his media career, Tate has launched and overseen dozens of print and electronic publications. He is the chief executive and major shareholder of Conexus Financial, which was established in 2005, and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia.

The company hosts more than 20 conferences and events globally each year and publishes three digital publications, including the global website and strategy newsletter for global institutional investors Top1000Funds.com, Professional Planner for financial planners, accountants and private bankers in Australia and Investment Magazine for Australian superfunds and institutional investors. One of the company’s signature events is the bi-annual Fiduciary Investors Symposium attended by global asset owners and hosted in the Americas and Europe.

Conexus Financial’s events aim to place the responsibilities of investors in wider societal and political contexts, as well as promote the long-term stability of markets and sustainable retirement incomes.

Tate served for seven years on the board of Australia’s most high profile homeless charity, The Wayside Chapel; and he has underwritten the welfare of 60,000 people in 28 villages throughout Uganda via The Hunger Project. In 2021 was appointed as a Member (AM) of the Order of Australia (General Division) for significant service to the community through charitable initiatives.

Despite its name the investment industry doesn’t do much investment; it mainly shuffles ownership rights, even in private equity. The climate challenge requires new investment on a staggering scale: new generating capacity, the electrification of everything, emissions-free fuel, carbon capture and sequestration, new supply chains and infrastructure, plus the building of negative emissions technologies. This session looked at the opportunities for new investment, the risk/return trade-off and how investors should approach the opportunities.

Click here to view Arun’s slides 

Speaker

Dr. Arun Majumdar is the Jay Precourt Provostial Chair Professor at Stanford University, a faculty member of the departments of mechanical engineering and materials science and engineering (by courtesy) and senior fellow and former director of the Precourt Institute for Energy. He is also a faculty in department of photon science at SLAC.
In October 2009, Dr. Majumdar was nominated by President Obama and confirmed by the senate to become the founding director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), where he served till June 2012 and helped ARPA-E become a model of excellence and innovation for the government with bipartisan support from congress and other stakeholders. Between March 2011 and June 2012, he also served as the Acting Under Secretary of Energy, enabling the portfolio that reported to him: Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Office of Electricity Delivery and Reliability, Office of Nuclear Energy and the Office of Fossil Energy, as well as multiple cross-cutting efforts such as Sunshot, Grid Tech Team and others that he had initiated. Furthermore, he was a senior advisor to the Secretary of Energy, Dr. Steven Chu, on a variety of matters related to management, personnel, budget, and policy. In 2010, he served on Secretary Chu’s science team to help stop the leak of the Deep Water Horizon (BP) oil spill.
After leaving Washington, DC and before joining Stanford, Dr. Majumdar was the vice president for energy at Google, where he assembled a team to create technologies and businesses at the intersection of data, computing and electricity grid.
Dr. Majumdar is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, US National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research in the past has involved the science and engineering of nanoscale materials and devices, especially in the areas of energy conversion, transport and storage as well as biomolecular analysis. His current research focuses on redox reactions and systems that are fundamental to a sustainable energy future, multidimensional nanoscale imaging and microscopy, and an effort to leverage modern AI techniques to develop and deliver energy and climate solutions.
Prior to joining the Department of Energy, Dr. Majumdar was the Almy & Agnes Maynard Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering at University of California–Berkeley and the Associate Laboratory Director for energy and environment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He also spent the early part of his academic career at Arizona State University and University of California, Santa Barbara.
Dr. Majumdar served as the vice chair of the advisory board of US Secretary of Energy, Dr. Ernest Moniz, and was also a science envoy for the US Department of State with focus on energy and technology innovation in the Baltics and Poland. He also serves on numerous advisory boards and boards of businesses, investment groups and non-profit organizations
Dr. Majumdar received his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1985 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989.

Moderator

White is responsible for the content across all Conexus Financial’s institutional media and events. She is responsible for directing the bi-annual Fiduciary Investors Symposium which challenges global investors on investment best practice and aims to place the responsibilities of investors in wider societal, and political contexts, as well as promote the long-term stability of markets and sustainable retirement incomes. She is the editor of conexust1f.flywheelstaging.com, the online news and analysis site for the world’s largest institutional investors. White has been an investment journalist for more than 20 years and has edited industry journals including Investment & Technology, Investor Weekly and MasterFunds Quarterly. She was previously editorial director of InvestorInfo and has worked as a freelance journalist for the Australian Financial Review, CFO, Asset and Asia Asset Management. She has a Bachelor of Economics from Sydney University and a Master of Arts in Journalism from the University of Technology, Sydney. She was previously a columnist for the Canadian publication, Corporate Knights, which is distributed by the Globe and Mail and The Washington Post. White is currently a fellow in the Finance Leaders Fellowship at the Aspen Institute. The two-year program consists of 22 fellows and seeks to develop the next generation of responsible, community-spirited leaders in the global finance industry.

Investor Response

This case study examined the approach by one of the world’s leading asset owners to incorporate sustainability, AP4. By implementing measures adapted to the asset class and style of investments, AP4’s team in alternative investments works to both reduce risks and capture opportunities related to the sustainability transformation.

Click here to view Jenny’s slides

Speaker

Jenny Askfelt Ruud is Head of Alternative investments, i.e., private market investments in real assets, private equity and private debt, at Fjärde AP-fonden (AP4). AP4 is one of five buffer funds within the Swedish state pension system managing about USD 50 billion. A fundamental belief of AP4 is that integration of sustainability aspects in asset management and investment analyses and decisions is a necessity for a long-term pension manager.

Ms Askfelt Ruud started her career in M&A at Morgan Stanley in London in 1998, where she also worked as an associate at venture investor Arts Alliance. Joining McKinsey & Company’s corporate finance practice in Stockholm in 2001 allowed her to work on strategic and operational advisory with a broad range of clients, including several investment houses. In 2007, she joined Private Equity-investor Ratos and worked as Senior Investment Manager for some years before becoming the firm’s first Head of Sustainability, in charge of implementing ESG and sustainability in the firm’s investment and ownership practices. She joined AP4 in 2018 with a mission to increase AP4:s private market exposure and investments in sustainability themed strategies.

Ms. Askfelt Ruud received her master’s degree in finance and accounting from Stockholm School of Economics.

Moderator

Tate has been an investment industry media publisher and conference producer since 1996. In his media career, Tate has launched and overseen dozens of print and electronic publications. He is the chief executive and major shareholder of Conexus Financial, which was established in 2005, and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia.

The company hosts more than 20 conferences and events globally each year and publishes three digital publications, including the global website and strategy newsletter for global institutional investors Top1000Funds.com, Professional Planner for financial planners, accountants and private bankers in Australia and Investment Magazine for Australian superfunds and institutional investors. One of the company’s signature events is the bi-annual Fiduciary Investors Symposium attended by global asset owners and hosted in the Americas and Europe.

Conexus Financial’s events aim to place the responsibilities of investors in wider societal and political contexts, as well as promote the long-term stability of markets and sustainable retirement incomes.

Tate served for seven years on the board of Australia’s most high profile homeless charity, The Wayside Chapel; and he has underwritten the welfare of 60,000 people in 28 villages throughout Uganda via The Hunger Project. In 2021 was appointed as a Member (AM) of the Order of Australia (General Division) for significant service to the community through charitable initiatives.