The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating a shift by central banks and sovereign wealth and public pension funds to greener and more activist investment strategies, one of the largest annual surveys of their behaviours showed.
The Global Public Investor survey by think-tank Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) sampled 102 institutions overseeing a combined $7 trillion this year to track how the pandemic and other long-term trends are affecting them.
The findings of the survey, seen by Reuters ahead of its publication on Wednesday, showed the scale and speed at which environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors were now driving investment decisions.
“There has definitely been an acceleration due to COVID,” OMFIF’s Chief Economist Danae Kyriakopoulou said.
“At the beginning (of the pandemic), we thought there would be a focus on the short-term, the quick boosts to recoveries. But actually there has been this realisation that our financial systems are so vulnerable to things outside the financial world”.
