LGT Wealth Management appoints first Chief Sustainability Officer

UK-based LGT Wealth Management has promoted Phoebe Stone to the newly-created role of Chief Sustainability Officer as it develops sustainable investments.

Stone has been at the firm for 10 years, most recently as Partner and Head of Sustainable Investing. As Chief Sustainability Officer, she now reports directly to CEO Ben Snee.

LGT Wealth, which manages over £400 billion of assets for clients across 15 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, launched a sustainable investment offering in 2018 – as well as a plan to offset the emissions of its own operations and portfolio by 2030.

LGT engaging with portfolio companies on sustainability

Over the last couple of years, its focus on sustainable investment has led it to vote against the reappointment of several Procter & Gamble board members for their “insufficient action on deforestation” – an accusation brought by NGO Friends of the Earth and verified by data provider Nature Alpha on behalf of LGT.

As a significant investor in the mining sector, LGT Wealth has also joined the Global Investor Commission on Mining 2030 – launched in November last year to support the development of a responsible mining industry by the end of the decade.

In addition, the wealth management firm is engaging with some of its highly-polluting clients to support their decarbonisation: in the case of mining firm Rio Tinto, that meant voting against a proposal to exclude Scope 3 from climate targets “following a disappointing climate transition plan at their 2022 AGM”.

The investor has also met with Rio Tinto representatives to encourage plans to validate climate targets through the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) and increase the proportion of green steel in the miner’s portfolio.

LGT Wealth Management’s own climate goals

For its own decarbonisation, LGT Wealth Management plans to reduce operational emissions by 90% by 2030, mainly by reducing air travel and switching to 100% renewable electricity at office locations.

However, the firm does not disclose its carbon footprint and has not had climate targets validated by the SBTi. Much of its decarbonisation strategy relies on the use of carbon offsets from the voluntary carbon market (VCM): “[Our] commitment entails acquiring offsetting capacity at a scale reaching hundreds of thousands of tonnes of CO2 in 2030 and beyond,” LGT says in its latest Sustainability 360 report.