IMPACT
We are convinced that environmental and social sustainability is not only entirely compatible with economic growth but fundamental to its resumption and continuation. Sustainability provides resilience against threats like human-made climate change and pollution, depletion of natural resources, migration and social unrest, and even against the knock-on effects of viral pandemics like Covid-19. Embracing sustainability is becoming a critical success factor for businesses worldwide as customers, investors and regulators demand it. We believe that sustainability and its twin, resilience, are together the global defining theme for the 2020s and beyond.
We believe in investing for impact, making and managing investments in private companies with the explicit intention to contribute to measurable positive environmental and social impact in addition to superior financial returns. Assessing, measuring and monitoring impact is fundamental to our investment analysis and decision-making process. We therefore adopted the IFC’s “Operating Principles for Impact Management” as our guiding principles in our impact considerations and integrated them throughout the investment life cycle of our investments. The UN Sustainable Development Goals are our guiding light, and we adhere to the UN’s PRI standards.
We use data driven evidence for our impact reporting. Impact investment is a new investment form where standards are developing. For monitoring and reporting processes, we have adopted the standards developed by the Impact Management Project (IMP). We support greater standardisaiton by adopting the IMP standard.
We believe that impact needs to be designed into products and services from the outset and must be measurable with demonstrably positive outcomes. The market adoption of products and services will increasingly depend on their ability to cope with the depletion of natural resources and the need to re-use, re-cycle and avoid the creation of waste streams that are dumped into landfill, in the seas and oceans, or incinerated. We systematically help investee company management to formulate and integrate their strategic impact objectives and associated action plan into their business planning and day-to-day operations. The management of each investee company is then accountable for its newly adopted impact plan and has to report to its board of directors against performance milestones.
We report regularly on our Impact progress to our own investors and other stakeholders.
UN SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS
Our impact methodology and its metrics are fully aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and captures ten of the 17 SDGs: