Claudia H Deutsch from New York
For years now, environmentalists have tried to persuade investors to eschew putting money into companies that pollute. Not surprisingly, Wall Street has sneered, insisting that a good way to maximise shareholder wealth is to minimise environmental costs.
But now the do-gooders are confronting the money folk with evidence that they are wrong, couched in the language that Wall Street knows best: numbers. They are showing, through real and phantom portfolios, that eco-efficient companies – those that recapture raw materials from waste, for example – reward stockholders with more than clean consciences.
“Analysts who don’t respond to talk about emissions understand if you say that such measures lower risks,” said Linda Descano, vice-president for environmental affairs at Salomon Smith Barney.
The new eco-investors do not suggest that environmental performance is more important than financial indicators of a stock’s prospects. They avoid environmentally sound companies whose stocks seem fully valued. And few will put more than 5% of their holdings into even the greenest company.
Nor are they investing only in “clean” industries – service firms, say, or solar energy and windmill companies. Instead, they are buying the “best of class” stocks in basic industries like steel or paper.
Few posit a direct cause-and-effect relationship between environmental performance and stock price. Instead, they say investors would do well to include environmental criteria when picking stocks.
“Wall Street sees environment as irrelevant, or bad news waiting to happen,” said Matthew Kiernan, chief executive of Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, a Toronto-based firm specialising in finance and the environment, that has a formula for tying environmental performance to stock price. “We say it is a robust proxy for financial performance.”
Confirming evidence is pouring in from Europe. Two years ago, Storebrand, a big Norwegian insurance company, and Scudder Kemper Investments jointly created the Storebrand Scudder Environmental Value fund. Scudder screens a company’s financials; Storebrand checks environmental factors. Only the stocks that pass both screens (Sony, Du Pont and 3M, for example) are included.
The fund, which started with $10- million of Storebrand’s money, has appreciated 44% since its inception, outperforming the Morgan Stanley Capital International World Index by more than eight percentage points.
Storebrand will offer the fund to European institutional investors this year and expects to offer it later in the United States. “We will not market this as a green fund, but as a good financial-returns fund with limited risk,” said Jan-Oluf Willums, a Storebrand senior vice-president.
That is the approach at UBS Brinson in Switzerland. Last year, as part of Swiss Bank, the group began offering two funds composed of 101 companies, including Johnson & Johnson, British Telecommunications and Bristol-Myers Squibb, that showed superior financial and environmental performance. A year later, the two eco-efficiency funds, which are distributed only in Europe, had increased in value by 24%, compared the Morgan Stanley index’s 22,4%.
“An eco-efficient company is making efficient use of its resources, and that’s probably a strong signal that it is well managed as a whole,” said Ingeborg Schumacher, an associate director of UBS Brinson.
North American environmentalists-cum- financiers are buying into that idea. In January, Innovest put together a phantom portfolio that included all Standard & Poor’s (S&P)500 companies but was overweighted in the stocks of 65 companies with high scores on environmental factors and underweighted in those with low scores. In the first half of 1998, the environmentally weighted portfolio outperformed the S&P by 2,8 percentage points.
That does not surprise Jackson Robinson, president of the Winslow Management Company, the environmentally focused division of Eaton Vance, the mutual fund management company. Winslow pumped money into KTI Incorporated, a company that uses a relatively clean method to burn waste to generate electricity. KTI also extracts aluminium and other metals for recycling. Its stock is up 34% this year, vastly outperforming the S&P.
“Some of the best investment opportunities are environmentally sensitive companies in otherwise `dirty’ industries,” Robinson said.
But that idea remains a hard sell. “You say `environment’ to a bunch of analysts, and they go, `Ugh, risk, negative,”‘ said Lisa Laff, an asset manager at Salomon Smith Barney and chair of the New York Society of Securities Analysts’ social investment working group. Part of the problem is that environmental data are hard to get. “It’s a lot easier to check out a company’s margins than to figure how they manage their waste,” said Jack Kelly, a conglomerate analyst at Goldman, Sachs.
Still, proponents of environmental investing are building a compelling case for making the effort. The Alliance for Environmental Innovation, a non-profit group in Boston, recently reviewed 70 research studies and concluded that companies that outperform their peers environmentally will outperform them on the stock market, by as much as two percentage points. They found no studies that documented a negative relationship between financial and environmental performance.
In another study, released last year, the ICF Kaiser Consulting Group found that companies with high scores on environmental criteria were “lower-beta stocks,” financial jargon for less risky investments, and would thus enjoy a lower cost of capital and, ultimately, a higher stock price. In fact, the study, which looked at 327 of the S&P 500 companies, indicated that companies can push up their stock price 5% by improving their environmental performance.
ICF Kaiser, however, is not claiming a cause-and-effect relationship between environment and stock price. “What we’ve done,” said Peter Soyka, an ICF Kaiser vice-president, “is to give executives something they can use to persuade their own boards that it makes sense to run an environmentally friendly operation.”