About us Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures report 2025

On the evidence we’ve seen, we believe the severity and frequency of weather events caused by climate change will increase in all the scenarios above in the coming decade.

A 1.5°C or 2°C scenario is likely to be much more favourable to your investment portfolios and therefore, your pension savings. If coordinated policy action is taken (an increasingly unlikely scenario), this is likely to support economic growth driven by both the investment required, and decreased risks for investors that come with consistent, supportive policy. We therefore think the 1.5°C scenario will be positive for the portfolio over the medium-term time horizon.

However, in the 2°C and 3°C scenarios, we believe a warmer world could negatively impact global economic growth and potentially lead to higher inflation. With a 3°C or higher warming scenario, the economic consequences are likely to be dire. This means that investments are likely to perform poorly.

We believe it’s in our members’ best long-term financial interests to do what we can to limit the rise of global temperatures to as close to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels as possible. There is a limit to what we can achieve on our own, but we aim to work together with other like-minded investors who share our concerns about the long-term financial risks of climate change and nature degradation.

We take several key actions to help achieve this:

1. Engage and influence the companies we’re invested with, to develop transition plans to increase the likelihood of them achieving net zero by 2050.
2. Engage with policy makers, regulators, and other stakeholders, to support policies that will increase the likelihood of achieving net zero by 2050.
3. Assess the companies in which we invest and exclude or resize investments where necessary. We are prepared to disinvest where we believe companies’ strategies result in unacceptable financial risks because they are not committing to transition quickly enough.
4. Identify climate-related investment opportunities which offer both financial returns and a positive contribution to a faster transition to net zero, such as investing in green bonds that finance a range of climate friendly projects.
5. Our investment manager Cardano, who manage our portfolios, are members of several industry organisations that support and inform our climate change approach, including the PRI (United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment), the IIGCC (Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change) and Pensions for Purpose. We are also members of the Asset Owners Council. We also support several collaborative initiatives that aim to engage with companies on environmental action, including Climate Action 100+, and the PRI Spring Initiative which is focused on tackling deforestation.
6. Committing to long-term targets within our investment portfolios, including eliminating net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with 50% emissions reduction by 2030 based on 2019 levels, and investing at least 75% of the portfolio’s investments in assets which support the Trustee’s Responsible Investment beliefs by having an explicit responsible investment objective.

We continue to monitor – and further enhance where necessary – the effectiveness of the investment strategy we agreed in 2023 and launched in 2024. This strategy embeds environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors, as well as real-world sustainability impact, into our investment approach.

Our primary approach to achieving real-world impact is through our engagement and stewardship of the companies we invest in. Through our investment manager Cardano we are involved in many initiatives to engage with our investee companies on their commitments regarding climate change, water use, supporting biodiversity and tackling deforestation; and their wider social impacts, particularly living wage and gender diversity.

We continue to work towards all of these objectives and remain on track to meet our Net Zero targets by 2050 with a 50% reduction by 2030 based on 2019 levels. We’d like to see the world decarbonise even more quickly than this, but the reality is that global GhG emissions have yet to peak, let alone decrease in-line with the pathway we’ve set out. So, we’ll keep engaging with our companies, reviewing these targets and our progress.

Through our strategy, now:pensions’ investments and your pension savings are now less carbon intensive and contributing to a more sustainable world.

To measure our impact, we carry out ongoing assessments of our targets and metrics to ensure we stay true to our principles. Over the past year we have developed our climate dashboard to provide real time data allowing us to see the effectiveness of our strategy.

We monitor key indicators against our benchmarks, such as our carbon footprint , our GhG emissions, the GhG emissions we have avoided through our investments and how the companies we invest in are using land to promote and protect biodiversity. Read the full report  for all the metrics we track.

We report against four climate change metrics.

Metric 1: total greenhouse gas emissions

Our 2025 emissions for GHG Scope 1 and 2* are 203,828 tCO2e for investments in corporate equity and credit. This is the total GHG emissions, in tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, of Scope 1 and 2 emissions. There has been an uplift from last year (194,322) due to an increase in now:pensions’ total assets under management (AUM) increasing because of investment performance and member contributions.

Metric 2: carbon footprint or emissions intensity

Our emissions intensity for GhG scope 1 and 2* is 42.1 tC02e per £1m invested in corporate equity and credit. Last year this figure was 52.0 tC02e per £1m invested, meaning our emissions intensity has fallen over the last 12 months.

Metric 3: investments with an explicit responsible investment objective (as a % of the DGF)

We continue to increase our investments in these areas, and this year’s result stands at 83.1.% of total assets. This includes green, social, and sustainable bonds, shares in companies we believe are able to transition and other environmentally aware investments.

Metric 4: Corporate equity and credit investments that are SBTi aligned

The amount of the portfolio that has targets in place reviewed by the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), stands at 37%, up from 30.2% the previous year. This shows the increased commitment of the companies we invest in to setting decarbonisation targets.

(Our full report includes Scope 3 emissions, in addition to Scope 1 and 2 emissions.)