MAM to become carbon negative and remove 100% of its historical emissions by 2030
By 2030, Montanaro Asset Management will be carbon negative and will have removed from the environment all the carbon it has emitted since its founding in 1991. We believe we are the first UK Asset Manager to commit to these ambitious targets.
We hope that it provides inspiration to others. Our focus will be on carbon sequestration and permanent storage. We recognise that there is no perfect way to account for our historical emissions. We do not have access to perfect historic data. We will overcompensate for the early years of our company, recognising that our emissions from the 1990s have been in the atmosphere for three decades.
We want to lead. Having recently recertified as a B Corporation with our highest ever score, now is the time to take an ambitious step forward.
This month, we entered into a partnership with the Danish Carbon Removal Platform company Klimate. Together, we are building an innovative portfolio of carbon removal projects to achieve our targets. This will include projects such as direct air capture; deep storage bio-oil; ocean kelp; and restorative tree-planting. All will be independently verified to ensure their integrity.
We recognise that some of these projects are early stage and unproven at scale. Some may work and some may fail. But we need a range of options in order to tackle climate change and supporting such projects speaks to our smaller company heritage.
Having first set a Net Zero carbon target in 2019, now is the time to launch even more ambitious goals. The climate crisis grows ever more serious. Global emissions need to fall by 45% by 2030 to keep temperatures below 1.5C relative to pre-industrial levels. Greenhouse gases continue to rise and there is now a 50% risk of breaching this threshold within the next decade. We do not like these odds.
Over the last few years, we have conducted a focused engagement project with our companies, encouraging them along the path to Net Zero and learning from many along the way. Pleasingly, the results are starting to come through. Since 2019, our Portfolio emissions have reduced by almost 50%, a staggering rate of decline that is due to our companies taking action (not Portfolio activity). Almost 40% of our companies have had climate targets verified by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). Across our operations, emissions have declined by 27%.
Last year, Montanaro chaired a Net Zero webinar, where we were joined by over 30 CEOs from the businesses we invest in. The conclusions were clear: today’s business leaders must decide whether they want to lead on climate change or sit on the side-lines and watch.
Our focus will also remain on reducing the absolute emissions of our operations and Portfolios and the additional projects that we already support, such as a large-scale rewilding project in Dorset.
The entire team are excited by the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead of us as we embark on the next leg of this journey. We will be sharing a more detailed outline of our strategy and methodology in due course.
About Montanaro:
Montanaro Asset Management is an asset management company that specialises exclusively in quoted Global, European and UK Small & MidCap equities. As of 31 December 2022, we managed client assets of £3.5 billion. A Certified B Corporation since 2019, our commitment to sustainability sits at the heart of our company and our investment approach.
About Klimate:
Klimate is a climate tech company founded in 2021 with its headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark. Klimate provides access to high-quality, innovative, and verifiable carbon removal solutions aligned with science. Klimate’s core purpose is to scale and accelerate the development of carbon removal methods and technologies needed to achieve the targets set forth by the Paris Agreement.