Winning the award for Fund of the year – listed equity, Mirova says its Global Sustainable Equity Fund's multi-thematic investment approach aims to identify opportunities which are playing a key role in building a sustainable world, selecting companies well positioned to take advantage of demographic, governance, technological, and environmental transitions over the next decade.
Its long-term investment approach is aligned with and informed by the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and focuses on impact seeking for portfolio alignment with a 2°C maximum global warming scenario.
Mirova has designed an internal Impact and ESG assessment framework that it says not only evaluates the financial consequences of ESG criteria but also seeks to report on the environmental and social impact of the assets in which it invests.
This requires analysis of a company's entire lifecycle, from the extraction of raw materials to the product's end of life. Sector-specific criteria for analysis are adjusted to meet the specificities of each asset studied.
In March, Mirova, along with Robeco and a group of 11 financial players, launched a call for expressions of interest (CEI) to develop a global database of avoided emissions factors and associated company-level avoided emissions.
Mirova has also enhanced the development of its biodiversity methodology. Together with a consortium of French asset managers, and its partners Iceberg Data Lab and I Care & Consult, the Corporate Biodiversity Footprint measurement tool has been developed to quantify the impact companies' business activities have on biodiversity.
As of October 2023, the SFDR article 9 euro-denominated share class of the fund reported total returns of 3.85% in the last 12 months and 69.7% since inception on 1 February 2018. Annualised performance over the last three years is 6.36% and 9.64% since inception. As of 31 December 2022, the fund had $4.54 billion in assets under management (AUM).
Also winning the award for Fund of the year – private equity, the Mirova Environment Acceleration Capital (MEAC) fund seeks to provide acceleration capital to innovative companies and solutions to the environmental challenges the world is facing.
It covers five themes: natural resources management, agri-technologies, circular economy, clean energy, and smart cities.
In 2022, the inaugural impact report for the MEAC fund reported five companies in their portfolio. Holdings include Ombrea, an agrivoltaic system; Tallano Technologies, an engineering technology company focused on vehicle pollution reduction; Agronutris, which produces insect-produced protein and oil for aquatic and pet foods; Naïo Technologies, which develops, produces, and sells electric-powered, "light, intelligent and autonomous" farming robots, and Vestack, a provider of turnkey solutions for the design and construction of low-carbon buildings made of mostly bio-sourced materials.
As part of an intentionality assessment, Mirova implemented an impact plan to monitor and measure the contributions of each investment and link half of its variable remuneration to those companies achieving their objectives.
One IMPACT awards judge said the fund is "a superb demonstration of what a private equity fund and a private equity house can look like with sustainability integrated end-to-end". Another praised the fund for it demonstrating "solid evidence of outcomes and strategy".
The fund was launched in 2021 and has a target size of €300 million ($328 million). The impact report states €34.5 million has been invested.
Mirova's head of sustainability research Mathilde Dufour has won Personality of the year in this year's IMPACT Awards.
