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Hazel Henderson

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Investing in Climate Prosperity

posted by Hazel Henderson on December 8, 2009

The world's giant pension and institutional funds (university and foundation endowments) are seeing the light on climate issues. As governments wrangle over how to cap carbon and other pollutants, how much it will cost and who should bear the costs, private investors in North America, Europe, China, India, Japan and Brazil have been quietly investing in the solution: shifting to low-carbon, cleaner, renewable energy; smarter, more efficient infrastructure and transportation.

Issue(s): Embedding Values , Creating Frameworks , Climate Change , Sustainability , Social Business , Tomorrow's Green Economy , Responsible Investment , Low Carbon Economy

Tag(s): Copenhagen , Global Climate Prosperity , GreenInvesting , low carbon strategies , renewable energies , US

GAME OVER!

posted by Hazel Henderson on July 16, 2009

A powerful new global player has emerged on the world stage: the
Group of 192.

Issue(s): Embedding Values , Why we need Force for Good companies , Sustainability , Global Financial Crisis , Responsible Investment

Region(s): North America , West Europe , East Europe & Former Soviet Union , Middle East , South Asia , East Asia , Southeast Asia , Australia and South Pacific

Tag(s): Economy , Finance , FinancialCrisis , G20 , Markets

Changing the Game

posted by Hazel Henderson on October 20, 2009

'Changing the Game' is a paper that has been written in honor of the sustainable and responsible investment industry pioneers who will gather for the 20th Anniversary SRI in the Rockies Conference. It offers more than an opportunity to review the hard-won progress of investors to prove that socially responsible investing is viable and now clearly out-performs traditional mainstream investing. Since the credit crises of 2008-2009, we can now assert with confidence that investing for long-term sustainability and taking ESG factors as material to asset valuation could have actually helped avert these crises. We investors are now winning the paradigm battle and cite the evidence to show that the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is bunk and by the same token show that the Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and, yes, even the sacred tenets of the "rational investor" and the Black-Scholes Merton Options Pricing Model all are part of history.

Thomas Kuhn, told us in 1963 in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, we often must wait until a generation passes from the scene. Today, we humans are out of time. Climate chaos is upon us and our limiting factor is not money – it never was, since money is simply one form of information. Time is now our limiting factor, as we have until 2020 to keep CO2 and other greenhouse gases, methane, as well as soot, ozone and other pollutants from raising global temperature more than 2°C. This means that the game of finance must change to address both its internally-generated global crises and the climate crises which finance has and continues to exacerbate with its blindness to ESG factors and its culture of greed, myopia and short-termism. We were encouraged by our colleague Mindy Lubber's remarks at the introduction of the statement on September 17th of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC): "We are ready and willing to up the ante and finance the transition to a low-carbon economy.

To access the rest of the paper click here

This is a shorter version that has been submitted to the Harvard Business Review, The Financial Analysts Journal, and in www.ethicalmarkets.com

Tag(s): climate change , responsible investment , sustainability

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