Institutional Investors Matter in ESG Investing

Hello and welcome to another episode of Peer Connections, a podcast produced by the Global Peer Financing Association, otherwise known as GPFA. I am Brooke Gilman, Secretary of GPFA. GPFA is excited to bring you a special podcast today focused on ESG investing and financing in the North American and UK markets. This podcast was originally recorded as part of a GPFA member subgroup meeting on the topic, and we're very pleased to be able to share with you for the first time the expert content that our members benefited from during their meeting. I want to first introduce the moderator of the session to our listeners. Lisa Mantello is a lawyer with the law firm Osler, Hoskin, and Harcourt in Toronto, Canada. Lisa is a partner with Osler specializing in the banking and financial services sector and is also a board member for GPFA. I now will turn the discussion over to Lisa to introduce the expert speakers joining her. We've put together a panel of industry experts, and we are also very lucky and happy to have Professor Gordon Clark, who is a professorial fellow at St. Edmund Hall at Oxford. He's Director Emeritus at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University and Co-Director of the Oxford Zurich Research Program. He is the Independent Chair of the IP Group's Ethics and ESG Committee, and he's an advisor to a handful of fintech startups in the UK and the US. He's been an employer nominated trustee on the Oxford Staff Pension Scheme for the past 10 years and has advised pension funds and related institutions on the design and delivery of DB and DC pensions. So thank you very much, Gordon, for joining us this morning. Next, I'd like to introduce you to Timothy Hughes, who is a partner at Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt. So Tim leads the capital markets tax practice at Osler. And he has been involved in structuring ESG investments in Canada for capital markets. Next, I'd like to introduce you to Michael Gimmes, who is a partner also at Osler. And Michael is the co-chair of Osler's Capital Markets Group. He's nationally and internationally recognized as a leading capital markets and cross-border corporate lawyer in Canada. Michael has also been at the forefront of structuring the ESG investing in Canada. Next, I would like to introduce Oliver Moyer, who is a partner at Slaughter & May, and Ollie is a member of the Infrastructure, Energy, and Natural Resources Practice Group, and is also an expert at ESG investing from an infrastructure perspective. And lastly, I'd like to introduce you to Azadeh Nasiri, who's also a partner at Slaughter & May, and who has a broad financing practice covering acquisition and general bank financings, and also has significant experience with ESG investing from a financial perspective. So thank you very much to all the speakers for joining us. And I'd like to just start by saying that ESG investing has really become quite significant to pension plans worldwide and to beneficial owners everywhere. So that's why we're having this session. There's been quite a demand for people to speak about ESG. And I think I'd like to call on both Michael to speak to ESG investings from a North American perspective and as a day to speak about it from the UK market and the European perspective. I'll kick off if that's okay. Thanks so much, Lisa. The last five to seven years, we've seen a huge growth in ESG debt financing in UK and Europe more generally. And when we use the term ESG financing, what we mean is an umbrella term that covers