Principles for Responsible Investment

[1] Its goal is to understand the implications of sustainability for investors and support signatories to facilitate incorporating these issues into their investment decision-making and ownership practices.

The Principles offer a framework of possible actions for incorporating environmental, social and corporate governance factors into investment practices across asset classes.

[3] In early 2005, the then UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, invited a group of the world's largest institutional investors to join a process to develop the Principles for Responsible Investment.

The Principles were incubated by the UNEP Finance Initiative and the UN Global Compact and were developed and launched by a joint Secretariat from both organizations including: James Gifford, Paul Clements Hunt, Georg Kell, Jacob Malthouse, Gordon Hagart, Philip Walker and Gavin Power.

The Principles are based on the notion that environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, such as climate change and human rights, can affect the performance of investment portfolios and should therefore be considered alongside more traditional financial factors if investors are to properly fulfill their fiduciary duty.

The PRI has around 200 staff based mostly in London, with offices in New York City, Seoul, São Paulo, Amsterdam, Tokyo and Cape Town.

In this fiduciary role, we believe that environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) issues can affect the performance of investment portfolios (to varying degrees across companies, sectors, regions, asset classes and through time).