Trellis gave CSOs a clear playbook for fossil-free retirement plans. Here's how Investature helps you put it into practice — starting with your baseline.
If you're a CSO or benefits leader, read Trellis’ article "The next frontier: A CSO's playbook for fossil-free retirement". It's the clearest roadmap we've seen for tackling the emissions hiding in your retirement plan, and it gets the sequence right: start with brokerage windows for the employees already looking, add specialized funds to the core menu, then move the defaults where most of the money actually sits.
Here's the thing about a good roadmap, though. It tells you where to go. It doesn't drive the car.
That's the gap we spend our days closing. Below is how each tier of the playbook goes from "good idea" to "done," and where Investature fits at each step.
First, the problem the playbook solves
Most CSOs know their Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions cold. Almost none look at Scope 3, Category 15 — the emissions embedded in the funds their own retirement plan holds. For a typical employer, financed emissions from a 401(k) or 403(b) plan can run 20 to 30 times larger than every operational source combined.
So this is the largest lever most companies have, and almost nobody is pulling it. Not because of ideology — because until recently, nobody could see it, move it, or prove it was safe to touch. The playbook points at the lever. Pulling it takes three things.
Turning the playbook into action
See it — before you touch any tier. You can't reduce what you can't measure, and every tier in the playbook assumes you already know your starting point. Most teams don't. Our Financed Emissions Calculator turns your entire fund lineup into a fund-by-fund carbon number using Weighted Average Carbon Intensity. That baseline is what makes Tier 1, 2, or 3 a decision instead of a guess.
Make the swap free — this is Tier 2 and Tier 3 in practice. Specialized core-menu funds and climate-smart defaults only work if the replacements hold up against the market-cap index on cost, tracking, and returns. This is where good intentions usually stall: nobody wants to trade performance for principle. They don't have to. Reallocating existing assets takes no new capital and no operating change — we call it the Zero-CapEx path — and the funds we identify are screened to be a comparable or better financial choice, not a concession. That's the argument that gets a CFO to yes.
Prove it's safe — this is what unlocks the defaults. Tier 3 is where the real emissions reduction lives, because roughly 80% of plan assets sit in defaults. It's also where fiduciary nerves are highest. The Trellis piece is right that the Department of Labor's 2022 Prudence and Loyalty rule cleared the ERISA excuse — weighing climate risk as a financial risk is prudent, not a breach. But "it's legal" and "our plan committee signed off" are different sentences. Our Investment Advisory service supplies the documentation and fund-selection rigor that gets committees comfortable enough to move the defaults, not just the edges.
Where to start
Start where the playbook assumes you already are: knowing your number.
Book a free advisory call. We'll turn your specific plan lineup into a real carbon figure, fund by fund, and then walk the three tiers with you — brokerage windows, core-menu swaps, default changes — as decisions backed by evidence instead of guesses.
Trellis gave you the map. We'll help you drive it.
