Net Zero Festival: Phoenix Group's Tim Lord on the challenge and necessity of building net zero investment portfolios

BusinessGreen staff
clock • 1 min read

VIDEO: Head of climate change at Phoenix Group explains how the pensions and investment is working to decarbonise its £300bn portfolio

Tim Lord is head of climate change at the Phoenix Group, the UK's largest long-term savings and retirement business which manages around £300bn of assets on behalf of 13 million customers.

In 2020, the company pledged to achieve net zero emissions across its investment portfolio by 2050, backed by interim decarbonisation goals for 2025 and 2030, by which point it is aiming to halve the emissions from all of the assets it controls.

Lord joined the company earlier this year from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change think tank, where he also led on net zero and climate policy. Before that, he worked in the civil service at BEIS, playing a key role in the work underpinning the UK's historic 2050 net zero emissions target, which was embedded into the statute books in 2020

Ahead of this week's Net Zero Festival, Lord sat down with BusinessGreen's James Murray for a fascinating chat about the challenge and complexity of decarbonising pensions and investments, the threat of climate and nature risks to lifetime savings, and why the financial sector - having been slow off the mark on net zero - is now rapidly moving into gear on climate action.

Their conversation can be watched in full above.

Phoenix Group is a partner of the Net Zero Festival.

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