Sustainability Investments: FAQs

Q: How do you define Sustainability Investments?

A: We have a developing understanding and definition of sustainability. We believe it will take a while to develop a concise and easy to understand definition of our interpretation of holistic sustainability which encompasses economic, environmental, social, and spiritual components - all interrelated and interdependent. However, we do not want to use this as an excuse not to invest. We believe we should influence the markets today with our limited amount of capital thereby laying the groundwork for more capital to follow. Additional capital will then demand more rigorous definitions and metrics. We consider ourselves innovators paving the way by experimenting with various indicators of sustainability and attempting to show the correlation of these indicators to long-term economic success.

We fundamentally believe that our planet's carrying capacity has already been surpassed and that 10 billion human beings will stretch its resources to or beyond its limits. Therefore any investment which tries to alleviate the consequences of scarce resources should be a stellar investment in the long run. But having a resource constrained environment also allows for the short-term advantage of taking limited resources at the expense of long-term sustainability. We are no longer willing to knowingly make that trade-off.

Q: Why do you track Sustainability Investments as a separate category?

A: We track our Sustainability Investments for three primary reasons. First, we want to look for investment opportunities with various combinations of positive sustainability indicators while avoiding ones with negative indicators. Second, we want to evaluate our Sustainability Investments' on-going performance and learn with and from these investments to refine our sustainability indicators and source better deals. Third, we want to track our Sustainability Investments' long-term financial performance as well as their sustainability performance to hopefully show the long-term correlation of the two.