By Carly Hammond Impact Investment Forum Program Manager, Responsible Investment Association Australasia. Not quite three years ago, the 193 UN Members adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), hailed by the then Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as a ‘universal, integrated and...
By Simon O'Connor, CEO, Responsible Investment Association Australasia Ethical investment used to be pretty straight-forward – avoid your traditional sin stocks, and invest in the rest of your universe. Recent developments have shown us just how far we have moved on from those days of safe, simple...
By Simon O’Connor, CEO, RIAA A new report was launched this week in Europe from the High Level Expert Group (HLEG) on Sustainable Finance, making wide-reaching recommendations on how to set the European financial system on a more sustainable footing, whilst driving more capital into supporting...
By Brian Trelstad, Bridges Fund Management The field of sustainable and impact investing has shown tremendous growth over the past few years. But there are still too many asset owners sitting on the sidelines; interested in impact, but not yet investing. To quote Bono – a...
As part of our role supporting the development of the market for impact investing in Australia and New Zealand through RIAA’s Impact Investment Forum, we attended the Social Enterprise World Forum in Christchurch in September 2017. RIAA’s Impact Investment Forum Program Manager Carly Hammond shares...
$23 trillion dollars - that’s the important number from the recently released Global Sustainable Investment Review 2016, a report RIAA was pleased to be launching with our colleagues from around the world in London last week (report here). All of us in Australia and New Zealand...
Simon O'Connor, chief executive of the Responsible Investment Association Australasia says businesses are being disrupted by the rise of conscientious consumers. The world of investment has been shaken wide awake in the recent weeks reminding financial institutions that they are managing other people's money and people...
Recently we’ve witnessed that Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investments have been growing across asset classes on the basis of stronger beliefs that they are not only ethically proof, but financially pragmatic as well. Yet ESG investments are not immune from macroeconomic trends and financial...
Yesterday’s launch of the responsible investment sector’s annual benchmarking report shows responsible investment has almost doubled in 2 years. The 2016 Responsible Investment Benchmark Report by the Responsible Investment Association of Australia (RIAA) found that core responsible investment has grown by 62% in one year and is now...
Today, 50,000 companies are annually subjected to ESG evaluations by 150 ratings systems on approximately 10,000 metrics according to MIT Sloan Management Review (see here). This certainly rings true for the Australian market, where over 190 pieces of ESG broking research by 10 broking firms were...
In September 2015, RIAA launched our new 3-Year Strategy (see here) that contained one big audacious goal – to grow funds flowing into core responsible investment products from 2.5% of the market to 10% of the market in 3 years. Stretch target? Yes. Achievable? We believe...
This was the question The Treasury sought views on last week, with the intention of enshrining this purpose in legislation to finally create clarity 24 years after the introduction of the compulsory Superannuation Guarantee. The obvious response to this question is that the purpose of super...