In the News

California's Leadership in Climate Change:

Time's Up for California AG Becerra to Investigate #ExxonKnew and Prove He's a Real Climate ...
EcoWatch
Time's Up for California AG Becerra to Investigate #ExxonKnew and Prove He's a Real Climate Leader ... Executives at companies like Exxon knew everything there was to know about climate change as far back as the 1970s, but chose to spend the last half a century sowing doubt and confusion.

For PG&E, mitigating climate change is a team sport
GreenBiz
Benjamin: We've had strong and consistent support from our leadership on this challenge for decades. We came out early to say that the climate threat is real, and the time for action is now. We supported California's landmark Global Warming Solutions Act in 2006. And we supported raising the state's ...

Sustainable Investing:

Morningstar Runs the Numbers
Morningstar.com
Sustainable investing involves the use of environmental, social, and corporate governance, or ESG, criteria to evaluate investments or to assess their societal impact. It's not hard to build a portfolio of funds around sustainable investing because the approach is used across a variety of investment ...

Emerging Sustainability Accounting and Investment Methodologies Dig Deep
Environmental Leader
Investors frequently assess companies based on their sustainability data, but corporations currently lack a standardized and widely accepted framework to share that information. As major fund providers like Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock push for better ESG disclosures, new methodologies are ...

Social Returns Just As Important for Millennials
Investopedia (blog)
At this point, Millennial influence on overall consumer spending and investment decisions is irrefutable. Their rising economic sway along with a keen social conscience is making socially responsible investing (SRI) and impact investing more economically significant and financially consequential. 

Global Reporting Initiative:

Sponda Plc's Financial Statements 2017 have been published
GlobeNewswire (press release)
Sponda Plc's Financial Statements 2017, Report by the Board of Directors and Auditor's Report have been published attached to this stock exchange release and on the company website at https://investors.sponda.fi/en/reports-and-presentations. The Financial Statements 2017 are available in Finnish ...

Tokyo 2020 to pioneer new legacy report
Olympics
This framework, together with the Olympic Games sustainability reports, will replace the Olympic Games Impact study (OGI), which had become outdated with the arrival of new reporting standards like the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) or the International Integrated Reporting Framework (IIRC). Starting ...

Valmet has published the Annual Report and the Corporate Governance Statement for 2017
Nasdaq
Valmet has today, on February 27, 2018, published its Annual Report for 2017 on the company's website www.valmet.com/annualreport2017. The Annual Report consists of three separate parts: the Annual Review, the Financial Statements and the GRI Supplement. The GRI Supplement is available in ... 

Renewable Energy Investments:

AI: The future of renewable energy investment
EURACTIV
Companies like Google and Amazon, as well as investment funds, are pouring millions of dollars into renewable energy. The use of predictive management tools and Artificial Intelligence is becoming more and more common in this process, writes Rodrigo Villamizar. Rodrigo Villamizar is the head of ...

Renewable energy for Concord is far from pretending
The Union Leader
The city of Concord Energy and Environment Committee's (CEEC) vision of a 100 percent renewable energy future by 2050 is worthy of strong community support, in stark contrast to the narrow ... The global capitalization in support of renewable energy far outstrips investments in coal, oil, and gas.

Avaada Power plans to invest Rs 25000 crore in clean energy projects in 4 years
Economic Times
“In the next four years, we will make ₹25,000 crore investments into the clean energy sector. The money will go into solar, wind, EPC, and rooftop, and we are going aggressively into the rooftop segment. We are also going into energy solutions,” Vineet Mittal, chairman of Avaada, told ET in an interaction ... 

CDP Sustainability:

N/A

Impact Investing:

Ontario, Canada Tries Out Impact Investment With A Local Bent And An Experimental Approach
Forbes
If you're based in Ontario, Canada, this one's particularly for you: a new impact investing fund focused on loans to social and environmental enterprises in Southwestern Ontario. But it's also a sign of growing interest in not just impact investing, but also doing such investing with a local focus and an ...

Impact Investors Seek to Expand Market
Barron's
Impact investing has accelerated rapidly in the last several years as more investors—both big institutional firms as well as wealthy families—seek to put capital into enterprises that make a difference for people and the planet while still generating a financial return. Investors who view impact investing as ...

Can Jewish charities do good and make money? Impact investors say yes.
Cleveland Jewish News
Julie Hammerman, who founded the JLens Investor Network, at the group's 2017 conference on impact investing. (Courtesy of JLens) ... asked Avi Deutsch, who with Vanessa Bartram co-founded Lavan, an organization that promotes impact investing within the Jewish community. “Financial decisions ... 

Resource Conservation Investments:

N/A

Socially Responsible Investing: 

Paid Family Leave Finds an Unlikely Ally: Investors
Slate Magazine
Then one day in October, a group of investors who collectively owned $2.4 million in Starbucks shares, filed the first-ever shareholder proposal on paid family leave. They were led by a small number of socially responsible investing firms based in Boston. The resolution stated that Starbucks had fallen ...

Study finds that when millennials save, they save in a socially responsible way
PR Newswire (press release)
When millennials do save, however, the Cornerstone Fund study finds that 40 percent of them save in a socially responsible way, 30 percent more than their older peers. Just 28 percent of Gen X'ers (those between the ages of 35 and 44) say that they currently participate in socially responsible investing ...

Funds for Sustainable Investing:

Vanguard debuts US factor funds: Fund Scan
Financial Planning
Vanguard unveiled its very first actively managed funds in the U.S. The launch including six ETFs and one mutual fund is part of the firm's latest effort to .... The Putnam Sustainable Leaders Fund, formerly the Putnam Multi-Cap Growth Fund, a multi-cap offering with more than $4.3 billion in assets will ...

Where Are The ESG Flows?
ETF.com
Of the 65 ETFs classified as “socially responsible,” only one has broken $1 billion in assets under management: the iShares MSCI KLD 400 Social ETF (DSI). Fourteen others have topped $100 million in assets, a common liquidity threshold that many investors use to gauge a fund's seaworthiness (see ...

Sustainable investment's breakthrough moment
Financial Director
At the same time, better knowledge would allow investors to match their investments with environmental requirements embedded in policy by funding the most appropriate energy installations, for example. “Financial markets work on the basis of information; the more information there is, the better they ... 

Sustainability Investing: 

Want strong stocks that also have a positive impact on the world? Morgan Stanley has 30 candidates
MarketWatch
According to a Thursday note, the 30 were selected by the investment bank's sustainability team, which evaluates securities through the lens of ESG investing. ESG stands for environmental, social, and corporate governance; strategies that evaluate companies on these issues and use those scores to ..

Philanthropic Investing

Investors and Philanthropists Can Partner to Finance Conservation
Conservation Finance Network
LegacyWorks Group was founded to help donors and investors who are interested in achieving community and conservation goals to mobilize their capital in highly collaborative, impactful ways. In this interview, LegacyWorks Group's founder, Carl Palmer, discusses the mindsets that allow philanthropic ...

Green Bond Funds:

Ontario Issues Canada's Largest Green Bond
Lexology
As discussed in our earlier post about green bonds, these bonds are like other bonds. The Ontario issuances are backed by the full faith and credit of the province, stand on equal footing with other provincial bonds, and do not confer project-specific risk on bondholders. The sole difference is that funds ...

Gov't to issue up to $2billion Eurobond by June
Myjoyonline.com
Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, has confirmed government could issue up to $2 billion Eurobond by June this year. Mr Ofori-Atta has been giving details of this ... Green bonds were created to fund projects that have positive environmental and/or climate benefits. The majority of the green bonds issued ...

N5.2tn Of Pension Fund Invested In FG securities By PFAs
Economic Confidential (press release)
A breakdown of the figures showed that the highest amount of N4.04tn was invested in Federal Government bonds alone. This was followed by N1.18tn investment in Treasury Bills, while investment in Sukuk bond, green bonds and agency bonds followed with N56.55bn, N7.18bn and N5.83bn, ... 

Low Carbon Funds:

New EBRD financing to Yapı Kredi
The FINANCIAL
The EBRD financing is being complemented by US$ 15 million from the Clean Technology Fund (CTF), one of the Climate Investment Funds, which helps countries increase the use of low-carbon technologies with significant potential for long-term savings in greenhouse gas emissions. Concessional ...

Carbon tax bill would increase the cost of gas, heating
The Independent
The revenue from the carbon tax bills would put more tax revenue in the general fund (SB 6203) and the low-carbon fuel standards in HB 2338 would fund the electrification of the transportation grid in Washington cities. But Rep. Jacqueline Maycumber said the bill will not make any improvements to the ...

Dragon Financial & Investment Group LLC Takes Position in iShares MSCI ACWI Low Carbon ...
StockNewsTimes
Dragon Financial & Investment Group LLC acquired a new position in iShares MSCI ACWI Low Carbon Target ETF (NYSEARCA:CRBN) during the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The fund acquired 13,377 shares of the ...