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Sustainable Investing: Understanding ESG in Bonds

As investors, we believe ESG fixed income – or bonds – could soon rise to a place of leadership in sustainable investing.

As investors, we believe fixed income – or bonds – could soon rise to a place of leadership in sustainable investing. There is growing recognition in the marketplace that integrating ESG (environmental, social and governance) factors into traditional credit analysis adds a holistic and long-term perspective that aligns well with bond investing. Moreover, issuers often return to the bond market – unlike the stock market – in order to refinance old debt or seek new funding, giving bond investors a unique opportunity to identify risks, engage issuers and build relationships that can influence change.

Common approaches to sustainable investing in fixed income

Sustainable investing is a spectrum of approaches that consider ESG factors in portfolio construction and management. These include:

  • Negative/positive screening: exclude or include sectors or securities based on pre-defined ESG criteria
  • ESG integration: the addition of ESG considerations alongside traditional financial analysis when buying or selling securities
  • Thematic: aligning asset allocations with a particular ESG theme, such as clean energy
  • Impact investing: seeking to deliver positive societal outcomes as a key investment objective
  • Issuer engagement: engage issuers to influence sustainable behavior and practices

Source: Global Sustainable Investment Alliance (GSIA)

PIMCO’s three-step approach to building ESG portfolios

PIMCO’s dedicated ESG strategies combine a number of approaches. They follow our time-tested investment process, applied to every portfolio, while using three additional buildings blocks: exclusion, evaluation and engagement. We call this our three-E process. Here’s what that means:

  • We exclude issuers that are fundamentally misaligned with sustainability principles.
  • We evaluate issuers through our proprietary ESG scoring system to identify “best-in-class” ESG issuers and candidates for engagement.
  • We engage with issuers that demonstrate a clear willingness to move toward better ESG-related practices. We believe that allocating capital toward issuers willing to improve the sustainability of their business practices can generate a greater impact than simply excluding issuers with poor ESG metrics and favoring those with strong metrics.

The chart outlines the three steps used to influence change for the dedicated ESG strategies. The three steps are exclude, evaluate and engage.

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