This month the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan released its 2023 Annual Report, which included an update to its climate strategy. Here are the report’s key highlights when it comes to climate risk and the energy transition.

The recent actions of four companies, on whose boards Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Director Deborah Stein sits, are indicative of an oil and gas industry that is expanding fossil fuels, lobbying to block government climate action, and fighting tooth and nail to prolong the use of fossil fuels. These companies are acting in ways that directly undermine the OTPP’s commitment to net-zero emissions and the rapid transition away from fossil fuels that is required to protect the retirement security of working and retired Ontario teachers. A year after Ms. Stein joined the OTPP Board, let’s take stock of what the companies on whose boards she sits have been up to in 2023.

At a time when the OTPP has made ambitious goals to align its investment strategy with addressing the climate crisis, it is bizarre that newly-chosen Directors appear to lack the required climate expertise needed to implement the OTPP’s net-zero commitment.

The OTPP continues to demonstrate national leadership in aligning the retirement savings of its members with a safe climate future. But despite its increasingly sophisticated strategy to manage climate-related financial risks, the OTPP is silent on how its massive oil, gas, pipeline and and related infrastructure investments have a credible, science-based pathway pathway to decarbonization.

The OTPP reduced portfolio emissions intensity by 32% and absolute emissions by 13% between 2019 and 2021. But the $242 billion pension fund continues to have significant problems with transparency and credibility when it comes to reconciling its climate commitments with its investments in high-risk fossil fuels.

The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Canada’s third largest pension, committed in January to net-zero emissions by 2050, and in September set interim targets for getting there, but it wasn’t until this week that the OTPP disclosed crucial details on how exactly it plans to achieve its goals. Shift Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health breaks down the highlights and examines what still needs to be done.