How veterans of Al Gore's firm plan to align on climate and still profit

• It launches as climate policies are under pressure in the U.S. and abroad, and some companies are pumping the brakes on green targets.

Driving the news: Resolution's Core Global Equity strategy enables clients to invest in a portfolio of 30 large, public companies.

• A core premise: Low-carbon transition is inevitable — and will reshape markets and companies.
• It vets a diverse array of companies on how they'll adapt and thrive in a world that's transitioning, however fitfully.
• It plans to raise $1 billion within the first couple of years, with $200M in the first year.

"If you're not ... thinking about the future, you candidly risk significant erosion of your earnings power over a long period of time and potentially even a shorter period of time," portfolio manager David Lowish tells Axios.

• "There are enough interested shareholders, irrespective of who's in the White House or whatever the political weather is, that are paying attention to these things because they're significant," he said.

The big picture: The company has a data-driven approach to its selection, which yields a portfolio of names that may not be the most obvious in this space.

• The 30 companies were selected from a wider list of 90 that fit their criteria and have a median market capitalization of about $60 billion.
• Companies must show major and verifiable emissions improvement, or provide products and services that "measurably and directly solve the world's pressing climate challenges," Rob Brown, the firm's director of climate research, said in a statement.

Catch up quick: Lowish co-founded Atlas Impact Partners and spent 11 years as a partner at Generation Investment Management.

• Co-portfolio managers Akhil Monappa and Andrew Mobbs are GIM vets too, as is COO Phill Harris.
• The firm launched in an Article 9 format under EU financial rules, which Bloomberg notes is the bloc's "strictest green investment category." It's planning a U.S. launch as well.

State of play: The portfolio, benchmarked against the MSCI World Index, is divided into buckets. "Transition leaders" include Thermo Fisher Scientific, Alphabet and Mastercard.

• "Reduction solutions" holdings include rail freight and heavy equipment giant Wabtec and Taiwan Semiconductor.

"We do an awful lot of work to make sure that we get that list of 90 names correct in terms of business quality, people and leadership quality, and climate alignment and materiality," Lowish said.

• One filter is near-term climate progress. "We're less interested in companies that sort of say, 'Look, we're going to be carbon neutral by 2050,' because candidly, that's just a platitude, right?" he said.
• He predicts a roughly 30% annual turnover in the portfolio.

The bottom line: "When you talk to our investors, what we constantly hear back from them is, they ... want to have great returns, and they want to have amazing climate alignment. And they're often pulled in two directions," Monappa said.

• Resolution prevents that tension by avoiding companies vulnerable to climate boom-and-bust cycles, he said.
• "We're able to marry both those things together" in a product he called high quality and "authentic" on climate.