ESG investing in Asia is growing sharply amongst wealth clients according to UBS.

UBS Global Wealth Management says growth over the past 18 months has been growing with client assets in sustainable investments in the first half of 2021 reaching $4.5 billion, up 350% compared to the start of 2020.

Mario Knoepfel, Head of Sustainable Advisory APAC at UBS has said, “With everything that is going on around climate change, governance topics and so on, clients are reading about ESG which you didn’t read about three years ago. A more recent driver of demand not only into sustainable investments but broadly to globally diversified and actively managed portfolios is continued market turbulence in China”.