The scientific consensus is clear: climate change is here. And so is demand from investors seeking to help through lessening their carbon exposures. Intech and other signatories of the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative intend to increase the proportion of assets managed in line with efforts to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, among other advocacy groups attempting to shift institutional investing in the direction of sustainability.

An asset manager’s primary objective is still, in most cases, to help you address investment challenges, not climate challenges.While that mission may not feel as existential as global climate change, it’s still necessary for the continued solvency of institutional assets. Unfortunately, some important investment solutions of our day, such as defensive, low volatility equity strategies, may appear objectionable to climate-minded investors.

Two imperatives of our day – decarbonizing and de-risking – appear to be on a collision course. Can you reconcile these objectives? What are the trade-offs?

Decarbonization Imperative

The climate change urgency intensifies each year, with rising greenhouse gas emissions contributing to the earth’s higher average surface temperature. We recorded one of the warmest years on record in 2020 – more than 1.2° Celsius (2° Fahrenheit) higher than in 1880 (see chart below).¹

Paleoclimatology tells us that the earth’s temperature has been relatively stable, but since the dawn of industrialization, the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide has been rising as we burn fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas.² These pollutants absorb sunlight and solar radiation that would typically bounce off the earth and into space, trapping the heat and warming the planet.

If we continue to see an unabated rise in greenhouse emissions, extreme weather events and rising sea levels will persist, which have had and will continue to have widespread economic consequences.

De-risking Imperative

With bond yields at all-time lows and allocations to less-liquid alternatives already high, equities’ role in helping fund and pay future liabilities, or grow participant savings balances, is increasingly crucial. Unfortunately, unprecedented uncertainty at today’s lofty market levels makes it increasingly difficult for investors to stay the course with equity-dominated portfolios.

Rather than reducing equity allocations, some investors are seizing the opportunity to de-risk them. By replacing part of your core equity holding with a defensive, low volatility strategy, you have the potential to reduce overall portfolio volatility and mitigate drawdowns while at the same time preserving long-term return expectations and portfolio liquidity.

The illustrations below make a simple, cyclical case for low volatility investing. Low volatility equities have historically offered market-like returns with a quarter less volatility than a cap-weighted benchmark, allowing for better compounding over time. But the recent market environment has led to record under-performance for low volatility investing. That makes allocations to defensive equity especially compelling today.

High Carbon, Low Volatility Stocks

Low carbon and low volatility investing are seemingly incompatible visions, especially if you tie the benefits of low volatility investing to holding low volatility stocks. Through that lens, low volatility investing might produce a portfolio of very high carbon emitters, underscored by a significant overweight to the utilities sector.

S&P helps illustrate this perceived problem, since they employ a stock-driven approach to creating the S&P 500 Low Volatility Index. The Index selects the least volatile stocks and weights them in inverse proportion to that same metric. Consequently, relative to the S&P 500 Index, the S&P 500 Low Volatility Index has a 17% overweight to utilities – the largest overweight of any sector, in the sector with the highest relative carbon intensity. At the same time, it significantly underweights sectors with low relative carbon intensity (see below).

Make Low Volatility and Low Carbon Investing Work Together

The apparent positioning of this heuristic-based low volatility index may see to be in direct conflict with low carbon. It’s understandable if this seems par for the course; given the long bull market, many investors haven’t seriously examined low volatility investing lately. But there is a better way. To see how a different approach to low volatility makes it possible to surmount this obstacle, download our latest brief eBook, “Low Vol Investing on a Low Carb(on) Diet.”

1. 2020 Tied for Warmest Year on Record, NASA Analysis Shows. (2021). Retrieved 14 October 2021, from https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/2020-tied-for-warmest-year-on-record-nasa-analysis-shows

2. USGCRP, 2017: Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I [Wuebbles, D.J., D.W. Fahey, K.A. Hibbard, D.J. Dokken, B.C. Stewart, and T.K. Maycock (eds.)]. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA, 470 pp, doi: 10.7930/J0J964J6

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