Topic: The Climate Impact of Investments
Speaker: Mattias Gunnemyr
Date: February 13, 2026
Time: 13.00-14.00
Location: Teams, sign up here >
Organizer: Sustainable Finance Lab
ABSTRACT: Attributional metrics that allocate emissions to investors in proportion to ownership dominate sustainable finance. Yet they overstate investor climate impact by allocating emissions rather than identifying causal influence. Consequential metrics aim to avoid this by estimating the difference an investment makes to emissions. However, they underestimate impact whenever investor actions are overdetermined or pre-empted—a common feature of financial markets. We show that causal models of impact, including the Halpern–Pearl and NESS accounts, deliver more accurate verdicts in these cases and clarify the mechanisms through which investors affect corporate emissions. Applying two measures of degrees of causal contribution to a stylized oil company scenario, we compare the climate impact of divestment and voting. Engagement emerges as far more impactful than reallocating shares, something attributional metrics cannot capture. We outline implications for climate-oriented investment strategies.
BIO: Mattias Gunnemyr is a researcher in the Financial Ethics group at the University of Gothenburg and an affiliated researcher at Sustainable Finance Lab. His work focuses on ethical issues related to collective harm in finance. He earned his Ph.D. in practical philosophy from Lund University in 2021, where his dissertation examined individual moral responsibility and blameworthiness in contexts such as greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to his research on collective harm, he has published on structural injustice, particularly Iris Marion Young’s social connection model, and is currently editing an anthology on the collective harm problem.
