Bonds are a set of financial products ideally suited to both the financing of long-payback period energy projects and to providing institutional investors with security of returns over the longer term. Climate Bonds are intended to unlock ‘patient capital’: taking savings which require secure returns over long periods of time, such as those held by pension funds, and investing them in low-carbon projects that have high up-front costs but good payback rates over the long term. Climate Bonds need not differ greatly from existing government and corporate bonds, save for their central purpose: the funds they attract are underpinned by real and verifiable energy efficiency and renewable energy projects that in some certifiable manner contribute to the mitigation of climate change. At a minimum this has marketing benefits, allowing investors to report to their members on how their secure investments are also making a contribution to addressing climate change. At a maximum, investors...

This piece documents a Management Today and Tomorrow's Copmany rountable discussion kindly hosted by Lovells. In it a number of leading business practicitioners and thinkers sat down to answer some of the key questions that came out of the Tomorrow's Owners - Stewardship of tomorrow's company report and it produced some rather interesting ideas for change. Here is a full list of the very high quality participants: Tim Wates, chairman, Wates Family Holdings; Will Hutton, executive vice chair, The Work Foundation; Adrian Beecroft, senior managing partner, Apax Partners; Sir John Egan, chairman, Severn Trent Water;  Colin Melvin, CEO, Hermes Equity Ownership Services; Mark Goyder, founder director, Tomorrow's Company; Rajesh Sennik, leader, private equity and corporate strategy, Accenture; Round Table chairman: Matthew Gwyther, editor, MT; Blake Lee, Harwood environmental consultant; Richard Ufland, corporate partner, Lovells;

   “A lack of long-term stewardship by company heads and shareholders is at the heart of the current financial crisis, an influential think-tank says in a report published on Wednesday. Tomorrow’s Company, whose previous research has helped shape UK company law, urges the government to understand better the effects of the growing “casino economy”, where activities such as derivatives trading are often far removed from the real economy activity to which they theoretically relate. The report warns against the search for scapegoats for the current crisis and says that it is wrong to attack private equity, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds for irresponsibility, noting that different shareholders perform different functions. However, it condemns the practice of borrowing shares for voting purposes and asks if investors need to toughen up their engagement to change company behaviour or divest holdings in companies with particular shortcomings. Mark Goyder, Tomorrow’s Company...

Date: May 2004There has been a general consensus that socially responsible investing (SRI) leads to inferior, rather than superior, performance. Using Innovest’s corporate ecoefficiency scores, the authors of this report provided evidence to the contrary. They composed two equity portfolios of different "eco-efficiency" ratings and found that over the period 1995-2003 the high-ranked portfolio gave substantially higher average returns than the low-ranked one. They showed that this difference could not be explained by differences in market sensitivity, investment style, or several other factors, and so concluded that the incremental benefits of SRI can be "substantial".