Jenna's Top Picks: The Transition to a More Sustainable Economy

This newsletter will focus on some of the benefits and challenges of sustainable investing as well as two core pillars of the transition to a more sustainable economy.

First, Charles French , Co-Portfolio Manager of the Impax Global Social Leaders Strategy, discusses the critical role of social investment and how Impax Asset Management is thinking about the transition.

“In terms of stepping back, Impax has been investing in the transition to a sustainable economy for over 20 years, and when we look at that obviously there's two core pillars which are really interesting to us. Firstly around environmental transition, the need for the economy to continue to grow, deliver the products and services that society needs with less environmental impact. So that's very much on the environmental kind of pillar. But we also think there's a very important transition that needs to happen on the societal side in terms of the products and services that people need to live every day. And perhaps that societal side has had less focus in recent years. And so that's where we built out our framework in terms of developing this strategy and the investment opportunities associated with it, and obviously there's lots of demographic trends around the world, growing ageing populations, emerging middle class in emerging markets, where there's just a need for more products and services to meet everyday requirements.”

Jason Britton, MBA, CSFA , Founder and CEO of Reflection Asset Management , has also spent decades in the sustainability space. He identifies what he finds most exciting about sustainable investing, as well as some of the challenges that can come with investing in ESG.

“Sustainable investing or impact investing or regenerative investing are all terms that seem to be floating around interchangeably. What I think most exciting about it, and the benefits of it, are that we're in the early innings and we're seeing a lot of positive momentum. We're seeing a lot of truly measurable societal outcomes and people's lives being generally improved in both impact and sustainable investing. in terms of the challenges, as I said before, there isn't really a prescribed methodology. So it's a bit of the Wild West right now where folks are all over the place trying to figure out how to do it well, how to do it at scale, how to make it repeatable and frankly, the challenge is, is that and this is the dirty little secret, I'm going to let our listeners in on if you want to do something sustainable or you want to do something that's values based, you have to care about the end investor, and you have to be willing to do something custom, because not all of us share the same values and belief system.”