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by Claire Smith of Beyond Investing and Beyond Impact
Without wanting to dismiss men and their interest in sustainable investing, it seems to me that women have an inherently greater attention to the topic, given their physical role in bringing into existence the next generation of humans. This was something that I deeply felt as I prepared to give birth to my daughter. One becomes acutely conscious of environmental pollution, which as it enters your bloodstream, necessarily reaches the body of your as yet unborn child. One becomes more careful about the food that you eat, realizing that you are not only sustaining your own body, but that you are literally building another human’s body from within. You begin to realize that your child’s ability to live, thrive and survive in the world to come depends on the myriad of decisions that other human beings are making on a daily basis, as consumers, citizens or providers and users of capital, which have an impact on the natural world and its ability to sustain us in the future.
Sustainability also means sustainable for humans, not just for the environment. While pregnant, I also got involved in a local environmental group that was protesting the roll-out of genetically modified crops in the UK. Besides the unleashing of potentially hazardous, untested materials, it became evident that a primary motivation for the genetic modification of crops was to allow even more poisons to be sprayed onto crops. Leaving aside the damage to human health of higher concentrations of chemicals in food, this was also affecting soil health, thus creating a more reliable stream of cash to agrochemicals companies.
It is against this backdrop that I realised that to make an impact and bring about a truly sustainable approach to investing, I had to find some way to incorporate my convictions and concern for animals and the environment into my professional life. Whereas I had adopted sustainable practices in my personal life, like being a vegetarian and a supporter of animal rights, as well as recycling, generating hot water and electricity from solar panels to fuel our heating system and electric car, I was still spending my time, and using my financial expertise, to generate returns for investor clients, and facing daily dilemmas when confronted with the decisions of other investment managers, who for example were providing rescue financing for coal companies, providing them with short-term financial returns, but enabling hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 to be emitted.
So what happened next? Read Claire's full article here - https://greenmoney.com/a-female-perspective-on-sustainable-investing
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