Sustainable Investing at Allspring

Henrietta Pacquement: This is a fascinating time to be involved in sustainability. Companies around the world rely on natural resources, and historically, apart from managing their assets, have had to face very little accountability regarding the management and usage of those resources. This is changing, driven by the need and/or desire to reduce emissions, improve waste management, and conserve water, to name but a few environmental evolutions. Additionally, companies are increasingly more attentive to how they manage their human capital and how it affects corporate culture and firm performance. At Allspring, we aspire for a sustainable future that is aligned with meeting our clients’ expectations, as well as our regulatory obligations. Our belief is that it is not only possible, but imperative, to be both good investors and good stewards of our planet. We believe climate risk is a meaningful investment risk factor. As such, we believe it is critical that sustainability is embedded and integrated across our investment and risk culture. As stewards of our clients’ capital, we deeply respect the diversity of our clients’ values, intentions, and choices. We believe in meeting our clients where they are at in their investment journey in a way that will enable them to navigate what’s ahead. Thus, it’s our responsibility to understand our clients’ overall goals and objectives, which includes their sustainability preferences. We recognize that different individuals, organizations, and regions have varying standards, goals, and regulations, and ability to integrate sustainability across their investment portfolio. The Sustainability team has grown over the years and brought in a wealth of talent, experience, and passion to work with our business partners across Allspring and our client base to design thoughtful solutions. The team has been organized to provide valuable insights into topical themes that have both investor and real-world consequences and create context around potential investment opportunities. Our research and development team seeks to provide differentiated research to distill climate, water, biodiversity, and other sustainability themes into actionable investment ideas. Our investment team supports investment teams with educational training and process consulting. Our analytics and reporting team helps provide the metrics portfolio managers require to effectively manage their portfolios, as well as supporting our client groups with portfolio-level sustainability characteristics. Our stewardship team seeks to help protect client capital by improving investee disclosure and information flow that in turn informs and improves investment decision-making. Moreover, in partnering with investee companies, we aspire to constructively advance the financial, operational, and sustainability performance of those companies in years to come. Finally, our strategy and implementation team is an active and collaborative partner in product development, client engagement, and regulatory change. As a group, we strive to learn from evolving insights gathered from investee companies, our clients, and industry bodies, as well as our proprietary research. We foster a collaborative environment of intellectual curiosity, grounded in generating practical applications that are attentive to our clients’ broad investment ambitions and our mission to elevate investing to be worth more.