Responsible Investment: Vice VS Nice
Financial Times
By John Authers
June 25, 2015
Large asset owners have outsize influence over the investment management industry. This month, they were joined by Pope Francis, whose encyclical on climate change nodded to the power of social boycotts.
“We are moving away from negative screening to positive impact investing,” says John Streur, Chief Executive Officer of Calvert, one of the pioneers of ethical investing since the 1980s.
The Mainau Declaration 2015 on Climate Change
Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings
July 2015
36 Nobel laureates signed the Mainau Declaration 2015 on Climate Change, an emphatic appeal for climate protection. It states “that the nations of the world must take the opportunity at the United Nations on Climate Change Conference in Paris on December 2015 to take decisive action to limit future global emissions.”
Episcopal Church Votes to Divest from Fossil Fuels: “This is a moral issue”
The Guardian
July 03, 2015
The leadership of the Episcopal church has voted to withdraw from fossil fuel holdings as a means of fighting climate change, delivering an important symbolic victory to environmental campaigners. Two weeks after the pope’s pastoral letter on the environment, the divestment decision by a major US Protestant denomination underscored that climate change is increasingly seen by religious leaders as a deeply moral issue.
Report: Investing and Social Impact
The Center for Effective Philanthropy
2015
Clearly, much attention is being paid to foundation investing practices— both foundation efforts to pursue programmatic goals through impact investing, and whether foundations are investing endowment assets in ways that may be at odds with their missions, values, or goals. To better understand foundation practices in these areas, the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) collected data on the prevalence of impact investing and negative screening, as part of a larger operational benchmarking study with large private foundations.
