Investors Don’t Want to Shun Companies With Sustainability Issues: Survey

“While today’s individual investors are most concerned with environmental issues, it is in the area of corporate governance — in the form of active engagement with leadership at companies and informed proxy voting power — where the asset management industry might exert its largest and most immediate positive influence,” Parry said.

The generational gap showed up in investors’ awareness of and interest in the social investment space, with attendant effects on retirement planning.

Eighty-six percent of U.S. survey participants who were 39 and younger said they were interested in sustainable investing, compared with 70% of those older than 50.

Asked whether they used a sustainable investing option in their retirement pension, 36% of respondents reported that their plans did not have such an option, and 44% said they did not know whether they had a sustainable option in their pension.

The survey found that even in the “forced-choice” environment of self-invested corporate or personal pensions, where investors have to do at least some browsing, only 20% were aware that they had a sustainable investing option.

Of those investors who recognized that they had such an option, however, 53% chose to use it — but with upward of five times more millennials in that group than baby boomers choosing to do so.

“The study data is profound in terms of what it suggests about the future of investing and how companies might better align themselves with the concerns of the next generation of investors,” Seyi Bucknor, head of Newton Americas, said in the statement.

“Younger investors increasingly want to see their values, interests and concerns reflected in their investment decisions. The study has fascinating things to tell our industry about how millennials, who have a long investing horizon, are thinking about sustainable investing as it relates to retirement planning.”

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