Sustainable Investing

Louise Nankiinga, Senior ESG Equity Research Analyst, Katherine Kroll, Director of Equity ESG Research and Strategy, and Karina Funk, Portfolio Manager and Chair of Sustainable Investing.

With a 12+ year track record in sustainable investing, we believe sustainability is an essential part of thoughtful investing.

We see incorporating a broad range of risks and opportunities into our research process as an important tool to generate long-term performance—including how a company or potential investment is managing products, services and solutions in the face of climate change and other long-term societal forces.

Just as we do not build portfolios based on models, we do not make assumptions about what sustainability means to a client. It can be a path to investment performance, a way to reflect values through an investment portfolio, an opportunity to make an impact on the world.

As long term investors, we make every effort to understand the challenges and opportunities that may impact businesses in the decades to come.

In this video, Karina Funk, CFA, co-portfolio manager of the Large-Cap Sustainable Growth strategy and chair of sustainable investing, explores our focus on finding companies at the intersection of positive fundamental and sustainable business drivers. Please click here for important disclosures.

Business risks can be managed or mismanaged. Companies can lean into opportunities, or miss out on them. As part of our due diligence, we consider a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative factors, data points, tactics, strategies and pieces of information to understand how they may provide challenges or opportunities for companies and issuers. In our sustainable strategies, we also consider how sustainability risks—such as climate, health, labor and regulatory risks—may impact an investment. Likewise we probe for companies and issuers whose approaches to sustainability may drive future performance by helping their customers save energy (by moving computing workloads to the cloud), save lives (by enabling therapeutic innovations such as cellular genomics), or improve lives (by bringing billions of underbanked populations around the world into the global financial system).

Recent News

Brown Advisory’s 2021 PRI Assessment Report

Brown Advisory has been a signatory to the PRI (Principles for Responsible Investment) since 2014. Each year, we complete a rigorous disclosure of our sustainable investing practices as part of our obligation as a signatory, and PRI in turn provides an evaluation of our practices and rates us relative to our peers in a variety of categories.
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Reflections on Stewardship

Brown Advisory has been added as a signatory of the U.K. Stewardship Code, reflecting our deep commitment to our clients, colleagues and communities. At Brown Advisory we think about stewardship broadly—indeed, the idea behind our purpose “raise the future” is the deep sense of responsibility we feel to help create a better and more sustainable future.
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Global Sustainable Fixed Income Launch

In February 2022 we launched the Brown Advisory Global Sustainable Total Return Bond strategy which takes a global, sustainable and dynamic approach, seeking to offer investors access to an attractive stream of income and risk-adjusted returns while simultaneously generating a positive impact on global sustainability.
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Recent Publications

Introducing the Brown Advisory U.S. Large-Cap Sustainable Value Strategy

We are very pleased to announce the launch our U.S. Sustainable Value Fund under our Dublin UCITS umbrella. The Fund joins our suite of sustainable funds that are available to institutional investors in the UK, Europe and Asia and is governed by Article 8 of the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR). It follows a successful US mutual fund launch in February for our US Large-Cap Sustainable Value Strategy.
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NOW Podcast, S4E4: Is “New” Nuclear the Answer?

Nuclear power has had a controversial history. Today, however, it is often considered an essential energy source for a lower-carbon future. In a continuation of our NOW series on the energy transition, Erika Pagel sits down with Joe Dominguez, CEO of Constellation, the leading operator of nuclear power plants in the US. Joe and Erika discuss progress in shifting to a lower-carbon economy, where nuclear fits in, promising innovations, and what it will take to get to net zero by 2050.
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Sustainable Sovereigns: Integrating ESG Analysis into Government Debt Research

Some years ago, we expanded our ESG framework into sovereign bonds, a relatively less developed area in sustainable fixed income. We view sovereign bonds as an asset class with the potential to achieve progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (U.N. SDGs), as sovereign issuers have ample ability and reach to address key environmental and social challenges.
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Reporting and Policy Statements

Transparency and disclosure are essential drivers of progress in sustainable investing. We seek to hold ourselves to the same standards that we expect of companies, municipalities and bond issuers, in terms of offering clear policies that describe our sustainable investment approach, as well as periodic reports on the impact and sustainable merits of our strategies.

Platform Policies and Reports

Sustainable Investing Policy
Contains information about our institutional investment strategies, and the standards in place for ESG integration.
Institutional Sustainable Fixed Income Investment Policy
Policies and concepts that guide the management of Brown Advisory’s sustainable fixed income strategies.
Institutional Engagement Policy
Covers the institutional investment team's approach to engagement, and current priority topics for engagement.
Proxy Voting Policy
Covers our proxy voting policy and processes for both institutional and balanced-portfolio clients.
Proxy Voting Dashboard
Detailed data on our proxy voting activity, as reported by Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS).