The Council on Ethics’ aim is to influence companies to address environmental and social issues through active dialogue, often together with other investors. Improved sustainability in companies’ business will give better returns in the long-term. The Council’s experience to date shows that dialogue is an effective tool that produces results.
Part of the AP Funds assets are invested globally in diversified equity portfolios comprising of up to 3 500 companies. To focus dialogues, both reactive and proactive, on the companies where they will have the greatest benefit, the Council applies a systematic working process. This process also helps ensure an even spread across various sectors, geographies and sustainability issues.
The issues that the Council addresses are often complex, and their solutions are rarely obvious. This means that, to succeed in persuading companies to act in a more responsible way, many factors often must come into place, like specific industry knowledge, contacts, time and commitment.
The Council encourages the companies to adopt appropriate guidelines, processes and systems for implantation and monitoring as well as transparent reporting. This will enable the companies to do business as responsibly as possible regardless of where in the world they are operating.
We aspire to make a difference. We seek to exert influence on companies all over the world in regard to sustainability issues, human rights, ethics, the environment, issues of great importance to people and society. Issues which can destroy or create value for companies.
We use dialogue to get companies to adopt proactive measures and to deal with incidents. This is how we can mitigate and prevent problems and accidents in a range of
companies and industries.
And this is how we perceive we can contribute to sustainable development and importantly, sustainable pensions for current and future pensioners.