Support CleanTechnica's work througha Substack subscription,on Patreon, oron Stripe. Help us produce all of thehigh-quality, original content we publish week after weekdespite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles.Massachusetts pension fund says review findings will inform manager-quality evaluations & selection.
The Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management Board (MassPRIM) has completed a review of how active equity managers assess climate-transition risk in high-emitting portfolio companies and incorporate that analysis into their investment decisions. The fund plans to use the findings in its overall evaluation of manager quality and the selection of new active managers.
At a July meeting of its Stewardship and Sustainability Committee, MassPRIM said the review found meaningful differences among managers, with some treating climate-transition risk as a core part of their investment approach while others are still developing their practices.
**In response, Ben Cushing, Director of the Sierra Club’s Sustainable Finance Campaign, issued the following statement: **“MassPRIM is taking an important step by making climate-transition risk part of how it evaluates investment managers and selects new ones. Pension funds should expect the firms entrusted with workers’ retirement savings to demonstrate that material climate risks are actually informing their investment decisions and practices. The next step is to make those expectations consequential: MassPRIM should follow through in manager selection and ongoing oversight, and make clear that managers that fail to meet them can ultimately face consequences for the mandates they manage.”
**Vick Mohanka, Director of the Sierra Club Massachusetts Chapter, added: **“Massachusetts should be leading the way in protecting public workers’ retirement savings from the growing financial risks of climate change. MassPRIM’s approach is an important step toward ensuring that the firms entrusted with workers’ money take those risks seriously and are held to a higher standard.”
Background:
MassPRIM manages approximately $130 billion in pension assets for Massachusetts public employees. MassPRIM began this manager-review process in 2025, examining how its public-markets managers address climate-related risks, particularly transition risk, as part of its broader assessment of manager quality.
The Sierra Club has called on pension funds and other asset owners to use their relationships with asset managers to strengthen climate-risk mitigation practices, including by incorporating climate standards into manager selection, oversight, and mandate decisions. Last December, the Sierra Club endorsed an assessment by Reclaim Finance of 30 major U.S. and European asset managers that called on pension funds and other asset owners to make manager selection conditional on strong climate practices and establish clear consequences for managers that fail to meet those requirements. In June, the Sierra Club welcomed New York City pension funds’ search for asset managers and urged the systems to hold managers accountable to their climate-risk standards.
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