Latest news

The Climate Endowment looks to keep things simple and low-risk. “Big pension funds and institutional investors are conservative, you can’t persuade them to make a trade-off on returns,” says its founder Philippe Desfosses.

Accounting for impact is notoriously difficult. Methodologies vary from one investor to the next. Impact investing, however, can only scale if they adopt harmonised standards. In a short series, we look at progress made in different sectors.

With the maritime sector agreeing to a 40% cut in emissions by 2030, private investors are increasingly betting on greening the maritime fleet, a market that may be worth up to $4tn.

Payroll giving, or donating part of your wages to charity, may be common in other countries, but it didn’t exist in the Netherlands. Until Sandra van Beest spotted an opportunity and founded The Social Handshake.

The Swiss government has announced a blended finance initiative intended to leverage up to 1bn Swiss francs ($1.09bn) in private sector impact investments in the developing world to meet the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Swedish government together with the Nordic Green Bank has launched a new facility to scale up clean cooking technologies for up to 3 million Africans.

The EU’s sustainable finance framework is already shaping the bloc’s investment landscape regardless of ongoing uncertainties around the full implementation of the new regulatory environment. But will it go far enough?

Gresham House, one of London’s oldest asset managers, is betting big on vertical farming. Peter Bachmann, its head of sustainable infrastructure, believes this high-tech agriculture is at a “breakthrough point”.

Financial institutions will achieve greater impact if they focus on so-called place-based impact investing in regional regeneration, instead of lending to certain sectors.

Mirjam ‘t Lam, the new managing director of Oikocredit, has to hit the ground running, faced with steering the impact investment institution and its beneficiaries through the pandemic and charting a new strategic course.