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ESG investing: how Covid-19 accelerated the social awakening

Since first engaging for stronger UK corporate governance in 1983, to becoming a founding signatory of the Principles for Responsible Investment in 2006, to spearheading the global 2017 Climate Action 100+, we have always shaped the conversation on investment and sustainability.

In 2014, we proved that ESG investing is more than just a feel-good phenomenon. Since then, we have continued to monitor how ESG factors impact shareholder returns – and every two years, we publish an intellectually honest assessment of the ESG investing environment.

So far, our research has found that both social and governance factors are statistically significant, allowing us to further integrate sustainability into our investment portfolios.

Today, we revisit our study, updating our results to examine how ESG factors have behaved during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. We also consider the interplay between growth and sustainability.

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Lewis Grant
Senior Portfolio Manager

Lewis joined the international business of Federated Hermes in February 2008 as a portfolio manager on the Global Equities team. In addition to his role as portfolio manager, Lewis is responsible for designing and implementing many of the team's systems. In particular he created our proprietary risk-modelling system, MultiFRAME, which is used across all investment teams based in London. He joined from Aon Consulting, where he worked as an actuarial consultant specialising in providing valuations and asset-liability modelling to a range of corporate and institutional clients. Lewis graduated from the University of Warwick in 2003 with a Master's degree in Mathematics, Operational Research, Statistics and Economics and subsequently qualified as a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries.

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