Portfolio Carbon Intensity Workout
- 03:39
Understand how to calculate the weighted average carbon intensity of the fund.
Glossary
ESG portfolio risk RiskTranscript
In this workout, we've been asked to calculate the weighted average carbon intensity of the fund. Now, the fund that we're referring to here is the portfolio with the holdings detailed below. Now, there's 10 holdings in this portfolio covering a range of sectors. We've got some natural resources companies, pharmaceuticals, industrials, a number of consumer stocks and then a tech stock at the bottom. We've also been given information in column C about the weightings of each holding in the portfolio, that's the value of the holding relative to the value of the fund as a whole. And in the next column, we've got the company's Scope one and Scope two greenhouse gas emissions. Now, this information is widely available and disclosed either in the integrated reports of the company or in the separate sustainability reports. And in the next column, we've got the company sales, that's their revenues in billions of dollars taken from their latest annual report. So the first thing that we need to do with this information is to calculate the carbon intensity of each holding in the fund. And we can calculate that using the data in column D and column A. One thing we need to be careful of here is the units because we've got the emissions in millions of tons and the sales in billions of dollars. So we just need to make a little adjustment to make sure that our units are adjusted for. So what we're gonna do, first of all, is we're gonna take the emissions from column D, divide it by the sales in column E, and then multiply that by 1,000 to convert our sales into millions, and that gives us the carbon intensity of BP in row nine. We can then reuse that formula simply by copying it down across each of the holdings in the fund. And we can see now the carbon intensity for each holding. And as we would expect, the companies at the top, that's the natural resources companies have the highest level of carbon intensity. However, we've been asked to calculate more than just the carbon intensity of each stock. We want to calculate the weighted average carbon intensity of the fund, so we need to take these carbon intensity values and adjust them for the weighting of each holding in the fund. And for that, we're simply gonna multiply the carbon intensity by the weighting of each holding. And we can see there that for BP, their weighted average carbon intensity is 22.7. Now, that's not so meaningful on its own, but we can then copy those formulas down, all the way to the bottom of the portfolio. And we now have a weighted average figure for each holding in the fund. And if we sum all of those together, that gives us the total weighted average carbon intensity of the fund. Now, how can we use this information? Well, it could be that the fund manager is aiming for a weighted average carbon intensity of less than 95. Well, he can now look across the holdings and see what's driving that. And as we noted before, the natural resources companies are particularly carbon intensive, but also we have a large weighting to BHP Billiton which is the most carbon intensive company. - So what we could do for example if we were the fund manager is we could decide to reduce our weighting to BHP Billiton, maybe reduce that to 10% and instead increase the allocation to ASML, that's a tech stock. So already, we brought the weight average carbon intensity of the fund down to below 95, or alternatively, if instead, the fund manager still wanted to maintain the same overall weighting to natural resources, they could instead increase their allocation to BP, which has a lower carbon intensity than BHP Billiton. But you can see that the fund manager still brings the weighted average carbon intensity below 95.