What are we doing to advance sustainability?

I’ve worked in the financial industry for most of my life. It’s a field focused on wealth and also a field that teaches you how wealth has many meanings, not all of them monetary based. Resources and legacies and future well-being – these are forms of wealth too. 

As the world’s largest truly global wealth manager, we have an important role to play both in growing and preserving wealth, no matter what form it takes. 

Resources and legacies and future well-being – these are forms of wealth too.

This week UBS released our Sustainability Report 2019, which details our efforts and commitments in the area of sustainability, highlighting firm-wide management of our own environmental footprint and supply chain as well as how we have worked to advance sustainability for clients and our larger industry. In 2019, we made significant progress toward meeting our ambitious targets, including in sustainable finance, philanthropy and climate strategy. 

Key milestones from 2019:

• We grew core sustainable investments to USD 488 billion in 2019, managed to more than double penetration to 13.5% and reached our three-year goal one year early.
• We further reduced our carbon-related assets to less than 1% of our total banking products exposure and strengthened our standards in the energy and utilities sectors.
• We improved the well-being of 3.3 million vulnerable children around the world with help of UBS Optimus Foundation and we set a new goal to improve lives of 5 million vulnerable children between 2020 and 2025. 

You can read the full Sustainability Report 2019 here.