Your weekly guide to Sustainable Investment
Upcoming TBLI Events
TBLI Inspiration Weekend
Join a transformative experience for Impact Leaders at Glen House, Scotland.
This exclusive retreat (max 15 attendees) connects investors, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders in a breathtaking natural setting.
Why Attend?
- Network beyond your usual circle
- Exchange ideas & insights with like-minded individuals
- Build lasting relationships, foster collaboration
The TBLI Experience:
- Intimate setting with guided discussions
- Delicious food, comfortable accommodations, and engaging excursions
- Enjoy a private concert and stunning Scottish scenery
€2,500 (includes food, drinks, accommodation, excursions & concert). All previous Glenhouse attendees receive 10% discount.
Limited spots are available! A 50% deposit secures your place.
For full details and impressions of Glenhouse
Would you like to watch a recording of a past TBLI Talk event? Visit this page
TBLI Radical Truth Podcast
How to create economic development with biodiversity conservation?
Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda I.A.P. (GESG) leads a movement of civil society organizations that form the Alliance for the Conservation of the Sierra Gorda. Together with partners they promote a living laboratory of best cultural practices, with interdisciplinary teams.
Learn how Martha Isabel “Pati” Ruiz Corzo and her team showed that the impossible is possible.
What will you learn?
- Does biodiversity have a monetary value?
- How to capture it?
- How to monetize nature's value?
Webinar - Rancilio Cube hosts TBLI's Robert Rubinstein
June 17th, 15:00 CEST
Join us as we dive into a compelling conversation about Impact and ESG Investing with Robert Rubinstein, social entrepreneur and Chairman & Founder of TBLI Group.
Sign up to join live
How forecasts of bad weather can drive up your grocery bills
Economists are seeing a growing link between isolated climate shocks and supply chain disruptions that lead to higher food costs.
It’s no secret that a warming world will drive food prices higher, a phenomenon increasingly known as “heatflation.” What’s less known, but a growing area of interest among economists and scientists alike, is the role individual extreme weather events — blistering temperatures in Texas, a destructive tornado in Iowa — may have on what U.S. consumers pay at the supermarket.
At first glance, the answer might seem logical: A drought or flood that impacts agricultural production will, eventually, drive up prices. But it’s not that simple, because what consumers pay for groceries isn’t only reflective of crop yields or herd sizes, but the whole supply chain. That’s where it gets interesting: Economists are beginning to see a growing trend that suggests weather forecasts play a part in sticker shock. Sometimes the mere prediction of an extreme event — like the record-breaking temperatures, hurricanes, and wildfires forecasters are bracing for this summer — can prompt a spike in prices.
It isn’t the forecast itself to blame, but concerns about what the weather to come might mean for the entire supply chain, as food manufacturers manage their risks and the expected future value of their goods, said Seungki Lee, an agricultural economist at Ohio State University.
“When it comes to the climate risk on food prices, people typically look at the production side. But over the last two years, we learned that extreme weather can raise food prices, [cause] transportation disruptions, as well as production disruptions,” said Lee.
How much we pay for the food we buy is determined by retailers, who consider the producer’s price, labor costs, and other factors. Any increases in what producers charge is typically passed on to consumers because grocery stores operate on thin profit margins. And if manufacturers expect to pay more for commodities like beef or specialty crops like avocados in the future, they may boost prices now to cover those anticipated increases.
“The whole discussion about the climate risks on the food supply chain is based on probabilities,” Lee said. “It is possible that we do not see extreme temperatures this summer, or even later this year. We may realize there was no significant weather shock hitting the supply chain, but unfortunately that will not be the end of the story.”
Supply chain disruptions and labor shortages are among the reasons food prices have climbed 25 percent since 2020. Climate change may be contributing as well. A study published earlier this year found “heatflation” could push them up by as much as 3 percentage points per year worldwide in just over a decade and by about 2 percentage points in North America. Simultaneous disasters in major crop and cattle producing regions around the world — known as multi-breadbasket failure — are among the primary forces driving these costs. Crop shortages in these regions may also squeeze prices, which can create volatility in the global market and bump up consumer costs.
Historically, a single, localized heat wave or storm typically wouldn’t disrupt the supply chain enough to prompt price hikes. But a warming world might be changing that dynamic as extreme weather events intensify and simultaneous occurrences of them become the norm. How much this adds to consumers’ grocery bills will vary, and depends upon whether these climate-fueled disasters hit what Lee calls “supply chain chokepoints” like vital shipping channels during harvest seasons.
Sustainable investments outperformed their traditional peers by almost 50% in 2023
Investors who have stuck by their sustainable investing principles despite political blowback in the United States are being rewarded with outsized portfolio returns, a study released this week says.
Citing Morningstar data, the study by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that in 2023 sustainable fund investments produced a median return of 12.6% compared with 8.6% for traditionally screened funds. That outperformance held for both stock funds and fixed-income investments and both mutual funds and exchange-traded funds.
“Asset owners are integrating ESG more, not less,” said Ramnath N. Iyer, the study author and research lead for sustainable finance, Asia. “Given their need for long-term performance, large asset owners understand the importance of incorporating sustainability outcomes into investment analyses and are likely to continue doing so.”
The 2023 data was not an anomaly, according to the study. Sustainable investments bested their traditional counterparts in 2019, 2020 and 2021 as well, underperforming only in 2022 when the Federal Reserve began to hike interest rates in the U.S. in order to combat inflation.
Environmental, social, and governance investing grew rapidly in investor and public consciousness between 2017 and 2022, the study said, and despite recent debate inflows into sustainable funds remain strong worldwide, especially in Europe. At the end of 2023 there was nearly $3 trillion invested in funds defined as sustainable by Morningstar.
“The increasing regulatory support and enhanced regulatory developments signal the mainstream adoption of climate, sustainability and ESG policies. It remains important to evaluate, gauge, and mitigate climate change risks when making investment decisions,” says Iyer, “Even the less stringent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s climate disclosure requirements can be viewed as a first step.”
Despite the 2023 financial performance, ESG funds saw outflows of $900 million in the first quarter of 2024, the study found. However, that was driven by $8.8 billion of outflows in the U.S. By contrast, Europe, the most advanced regionally in terms of embracing sustainable funds, experienced an inflow of almost $11 billion into the asset class.
The Lakewood, Ohio-based IEEFA examines issues related to energy markets, trends, and policies. The Institute’s mission is to accelerate the transition to a diverse, sustainable and profitable energy economy.
Source
The Guide to Crypto Impact Investing
By: Sir John Hargrave - Bitcoin market journal
Nathan Cummings was a grocery tycoon (you don’t hear those two words very often) who built Consolidated Foods, later known as the Sara Lee Corporation. You may know Sara Lee for their frozen cakes, but the company was much more, selling a wide variety of foods, beverages, and household products around the world.
Nathan Cummings, born in Canada as the first child of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants, became a very rich man. As his wealth grew, he gave much of it away, becoming an avid philanthropist, especially in the arts. Later he established the Nathan Cummings Foundation, whose mission is “creating a more just, vibrant, sustainable, and democratic society.”
This is what we call “impact investing,” or investing in companies and causes that will
- a) make money, and
- b) have a measurable and beneficial social or environmental impact.
Both are important, so I’ll repeat it. The investment has to a) make money (otherwise it’s a charitable contribution), but the investment should also b) have a measurable benefit in “ESG”*:
- Environmental: The company must help the environment (or at least not actively harm it).
- Social: The company must treat workers fairly (or at least not actively violate human rights).
- Governance: Management and the board must be transparent and honest (or at least not sus).
The usual investing wisdom is that if you want to b) have a measurable and beneficial impact, then you a) won’t make as much money. This was the giant leap of faith that the Cummings Foundation took when it went from putting 5% to 100% of its wealth into impact investing.
Inspired by a New York Times article called A Family Opens Up About its Investing Mistakes (great headline), I read the Cummings Foundation Report on their “mistakes” in trying to transition their foundation from using 5% of their assets to using 100% of their assets to achieve their mission.
The story of how they made this transition is a page-scroller. While the foundation had made gradual steps toward responsible investing, the big showdown came at a board meeting in 2017, where several generations of Cummings family members had to win over independent trustees – and each other – to get a majority vote to take the leap of faith into 100% impact investing.
The drama is full of boardroom politics, family relationships, and risk-taking pioneers. They hired Lowell Weiss, the former editor of Atlantic Monthly and White House speechwriter, to write the story, which would make a great Netflix show (think Succession for the socially-conscious generation).
Perhaps most remarkably, the Cummings Foundation is practicing what they preach, opening up about what went well on their journey toward impact investing, and what they got wrong. In this guide, I’ll outline a few of the lessons they learned, and how we might apply these lessons to crypto investing.
Impact Investing: Three Big Takeaways
1) You can make just as much money with impact investing, and maybe more. “Our new investment approach has not required any financial sacrifice,” the foundation reports. “None.”
The foundation created extensive models to show their new impact investing strategy provided stronger returns, even in the topsy-turvy economy of 2020, than their traditional strategy. They explode the myth that impact investing is not a money-making proposition.
Read full article
A rare celebration of Indigenous Pacific cultures underscores the cost of climate change
The festival highlights a cultural scene that is threatened by rising seas and dangerous storms.
More than 2,000 people are gathering in Hawaiʻi this week and next for the 13th Festival of Pacific Island Arts and Culture. It’s the largest gathering of Indigenous Pacific peoples in the world. And it comes at a critical time for the island region known as Oceania as sea levels, storms, and other climate effects threaten traditional ways of life and connections to land and sea.
Normally the festival takes place every four years and rotates between the three regions of the Pacific: Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia. But because of the pandemic, the event hasn’t happened for eight years. It was last held on Guam, and this is the first time since it was established in 1972 that it’s occurring in Hawaiʻi. From now through June 16, Indigenous peoples from more than two dozen Pacific nations and territories will be sharing their weaving, tattoo creations, films, visual art, wood carvings, dances, songs, literature, music, food, and other expressions of Indigenous culture.
Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, a University of Hawaiʻi professor from the Solomon Islands and former director of the university’s Center of Pacific Island Studies, said even though the focus of the festival is on performing arts, Pacific cultures are deeply interwoven with the environment.
“We produce and perform our culture vis-à-vis the environment,” said Kabutaulaka. “The baskets that we weave, the dances that we dance, are often about the environment. We use materials around us to create material culture.”
That interdependency makes climate change an existential threat. In Kiribati, Kabutaulaka said, taro is a key source of food and cultural celebrations, but sea level rise and resulting saltwater intrusion into islands’ freshwater lens, is making it harder to grow the starch. Forced relocation is another ongoing problem. Just two weeks ago, Papua New Guinea was the site of a deadly landslide that buried a village. Climate change will make such extreme weather events more common, forcing villages to relocate and severing Indigenous Pacific peoples’ connection to their ancestral lands.
The festival is also happening as island nations continue to deal with the ongoing effects of colonialism. New Caledonia’s delegation pulled out at the last minute after France’s efforts to push through a referendum that would dilute Indigenous voting power prompted protests and violence.
On Friday, the festival will feature a roundtable discussion on climate change featuring political leaders from Palau and the Federated State of Micronesia. On Sunday, local activists are speaking on militarization and environmental justice, and the connections between Hawaiʻi and Palestine.
Kabutaulaka is also helping to organize an academic event called Protecting Oceania that will include discussions of climate change, deep sea mining, mental health, and other issues. “It grapples with the idea of protection, what we are trying to protect, and how we are protecting it,” he said.
But the heart of the festival is still the arts. Vilsoni Hereniko was a student in Fiji in 1972 when the first Festival of Pacific Island Arts and Culture was held. He’s now a weaver, playwright, scholar, and a professor of cinematic arts at the University of Hawaiʻi.
