Companies Account: Anglo American and Index Constituents

companies account: However, major coal producers including BHP and Anglo American are included because they are listed as general mining firms rather than coal companies, according to The Guardian. FTSE Russell refused to provide the Guardian with a full list of index constituents but publicly available factsheets indicate that 34 oil and gas related companies account for 3.4% of the FTSE4Good developed index by market capitalisation. Index providers including FTSE Russell, MSCI, S&P Dow Jones Indices and Stoxx all run indices that take into account environmental, social and corporate governance concerns known as ESG. FTSE Russell, owned by the London Stock Exchange, says it has a hard exclusion for coal companies from its FTSE4Good ethical indices, after it was decided that the most-polluting major fossil fuel did not fit its criteria for a sustainable future. The inclusion of major oil and coal companies on indices is likely to prompt concerns about the term ESG being used to greenwash the reputations of major polluters. ethical investment indices The New York-headquartered MSCI claims that investors worldwide have used its ESG indices to direct well over 200bn in investments since 2014. Savers whose money is invested using these indices may be unaware that they are funding fossil fuel extraction, said Charlie Kronick, a senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace UK. In today's world, many people buying products labelled 4 Good' may expect that a fund created to take into account environmental impact would not include oil or other fossil fuel companies, he said. Fund managers such as Blackrock and Vanguard sell investors products such as exchange-traded funds, which track the performance of ESG indices. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.