Senior Associate, ESG Climate

Over the last 20 years, Ares’ success has been driven by our people and our culture. Today, our team is guided by our core values – Collaborative, Responsible, Entrepreneurial, Self-Aware, Trustworthy – and our purpose to be a catalyst for shared prosperity and a better future. Through our recruitment, career development and employee-focused programming, we are committed to fostering a welcoming and inclusive work environment where high-performance talent of diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives can build careers within this exciting and growing industry.

Job Description

Ares Management is seeking an experienced and hard-working Climate Senior Associate to implement climate change initiatives in Ares’ investment platform and corporate operations. Based out of our New York office, Climate Senior Associate will partner with internal stakeholders—including the Climate Strategy Lead, ESG team, investment teams, and relationship management teams—as well as portfolio companies and LPs to create value by implementing our firmwide climate change strategy.

Ares is a flat, flexible, and dynamic organization. The firm fosters a culture of collaboration, entrepreneurialism, integrity, and partnership, both internally amongst colleagues and externally amongst clients and other stakeholders. The Ares team operates with a growth mindset, communicates transparently, and cultivates a high-performance and results-oriented environment.

ESG at Ares

Building on our core values, we are weaving sustainability further into the fabric of our business. We believe a clear and compelling sustainability vision – one that unites our team across geographies, functions, and roles – is a prerequisite to delivering our maximum positive impact. Our program flows seamlessly from our culture, animating each of our employees’ day-to-day work, ultimately enabling us to act swiftly with a single Ares voice.

We pursue an ESG strategy that is designed to address the most material issues to our business, starting with a Corporate Sustainability program – how we lead by example through our own corporate operations – and then scaling through a Responsible Investment program – how we amplify our impact through our investment platform.

We believe that by being a leader for integration of environmental, social and corporate governance factors in our business, we can in turn drive greater adoption within our investment and portfolio management processes and help create better investment outcomes. Whether it’s protecting and growing the capital of our clients, creating long-term value for our shareholders or aligning our interests with business partners, we are committed to supporting sustainable practices that generate positive environmental and social impact – not just now, but for years to come.

Reporting relationships

Reports to:  Climate Strategy Lead (Principal)

Supervises: n/a

Primary functions & responsibilities

The Climate Senior Associate will work closely with the Climate Strategy Lead as well as professionals across each business line to build and execute a climate strategy aligned with the Ares firmwide ESG integration approach. This role will provide week-to-week support to various teams as Ares seeks to minimize its climate impact and capture opportunities to advance progress towards a lower carbon economy. Job responsibilities are expected to be split between (a) portfolio engagement, (b) carbon accounting, and (c) support for other climate initiatives.

Specific responsibilities include:

• Collaborate with the Climate Strategy Lead to continually define, develop, communicate, and refine our firmwide approach to decarbonization and climate risk management.

• Engage day-to-day with Ares portfolio companies and assets across all business lines to advise leadership and deploy decarbonization initiatives. Asset classes to be engaged include Credit, Private Equity, Infrastructure, Real Estate, and Secondaries. Regions include the U.S., Europe, and Asia-Pacific.

• Coordinate Ares’ annual financed emissions footprint including data collection, education/training, QAQC, calculation, analysis, reporting, and management of software vendors (primarily Watershed and Novata).

• Develop scalable tools to assist portfolio companies and assets in accelerating their decarbonization plans (e.g., playbooks, fact sheets, decks).

• Support Ares’ external climate-related reporting (e.g., TCFD reporting, LP requests, website).

• Support management of Ares’ Climate Action Group, a community of 40+ colleagues across investment groups and business functions, including the annual Climate Summit and quarterly update calls to drive action and accountability on our climate goals.

• Support investment professionals to bett