Infrastructure & Social Risk
Infrastructure development has the power to enrich communities, providing critical public services such as electricity, transport and water. However, it also possesses the potential to be very disruptive to the communities that it serves. Such disruptions include loss of amenity, increased pollution (both noise and air) as well as impacts on the local wildlife. These effects might be considered be minor for society at large but, for the local community, they can be very significant, creating negative sentiment and diminishing public support for the infrastructure development. As a result, a failure to identify and react to deteriorating public endorsement towards infrastructure projects has the potential to lead to delays or even project cancellation.
Our research focuses on measuring social risks using quantitative techniques and large datasets, especially mainstream and social media content.
We examine ESG risks and their implications for the investment community, the investment impact of climate risk on global infrastructure, and present our latest research insights into infrastructure investment portfolio construction and risk management.
In this research note, we show the results of using an AI-driven methodology to analyse news and social media and measure the systematic exposures to social risks that investors face in several English-speaking countries and any infrastructure sector.
In this paper, we propose using sentiment analysis to measure social sentiments across various infrastructure sectors. We describe our approach, develop indices of social sentiment, apply this method to wind power generation in the US and the UK, and validate sentiment as a proxy for public acceptance.
In this paper, we develop a measure of social sentiment for wind farms. This is a timely approach for analysis amid the current push towards cutting emissions from electricity production, especially given that wind power is a relatively mature renewable technology.
In this infrastructure ESG survey, we asked a large sample of investors in infrastructure why they need to have access to ESG data i.e., non-financial data, for the assets they hold or want to hold, examining three main questions.
We explore the role of ESG issues in an investment context, namely how institutional investors should incorporate ESG elements into the financial management of their portfolios. A growing number of investors are pursuing ESG objectives to directly improve environmental and social outcomes.