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The ESG Phenomenon: CCLA Investment Management, Guy's & St Thomas' Foundation

Editorial Staff

13 November 2024

, a charity asset manager, has teamed up with Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation, a UK charitable foundation, to launch a public consultation on how to cut corporate air pollution. The consultation is part of a 10-year philanthropic programme for Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation to tackle poor air quality in major urban areas.

The consultation – started last week and running until 17 December – will gather insights from investors, companies, non-government organisations and academics to produce recommendations for corporate action on air pollution. 

The organisations say they want a corporate benchmark aimed at creating transparent comparisons of companies’ management of air pollution, alongside a structured investor engagement initiative and a collective policy engagement effort.

In a statement last week, CCLA and the foundation cited data from UK Health Security Agency, in 2022, stating that in 2019, the burden of long-term exposure to air pollution in the UK was an effect equivalent to between 29,000 to 43,000 deaths for adults aged 30 and over. The groups also cited figures showing that in 2019, the global cost of health damages from PM2.5 air pollution (fine particulate matter) was estimated to be $8.1 trillion, equivalent to 6.1 per cent of the world's GDP (source: World Bank, 2022). The groups also referred to data showing that about 3.8 billion workdays could be lost because of air pollution by 2060.

The new consultation will initially focus on companies involved in on-road transport which was, for example, the largest source of NO2 and the second largest source of PM2.5 and PM10 (another measure of pollution) in the UK in 2022.