Macquarie Group announced several climate-conscious initiatives at the U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York earlier this week.
The firm joins a slew of major financial institutions, organizations and government entities that made moves to combat climate change at the event.
The Climate Finance Leadership Initiative (CFLI), established in January by Michael Bloomberg and joined by Macquarie and other major investors, made a series of group commitments, including a collective commitment to deploy $20 billion of emerging market climate finance by 2025.
Macquarie also announced plans to develop a pipeline of 20 gigawatts of new renewable energy projects over the next five years through its Green Investment Group (GIG). A fifth of the projects are expected to be in non-OECD market countries where climate finance flows have historically been weaker, according to Macquarie. Many of these projects are expected to be backed by PPAs with corporate clients.
“Over the last decade we have played a leading role in facilitating the shift towards renewables, with a particular focus on trying to address the various challenges that remain to full transition, including the need for a stronger pipeline of projects and integrating these with energy grids,” said Shemara Wikramanayake, CEO of Macquarie. “We are increasingly broadening our focus by seeking new solutions to emissions reduction across agriculture, waste and real estate and working to ensure our infrastructure investments are more climate resilient.”
In addition, Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets (MIRA) announced its intention to introduce carbon and energy reporting for its fund portfolio companies. Macquarie said the metrics will enable MIRA to make better investment and asset management decisions and help businesses within each fund portfolio target reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
MIRA is also close to raising A$1 billion ($678 million) for its most recent agricultural fund, which has a mandate to target improved on-farm energy efficiency and reduced carbon emissions through sustainable farm management practices.
Since 2010, Macquarie and the GIG have helped finance more than 22 gigawatts of generation capacity in onshore wind, offshore wind, solar, thermal, hydro, waste-to-energy, storage and energy management projects. This fiscal year, they have invested or arranged more than A$8 billion ($5.4 billion) in projects around the world.