NEWLY AVAILABLE: Groundbreaking New Resources Push the Frontier of Impact Performance

Jay OwenSRI/ESG News

Amit Bouri, Co-Founder and CEO of the Global Impact Investing Network, reviews the accomplishments of the Response, Recovery, and Resilience Investment Coalition’s (‘R3 Coalition’) since its beginning in May. The R3 Coalition launched as an industry effort to address the large-scale social and economic consequences of COVID-19, with the GIIN as the organizing body. Over the past six months, the R3 Coalition showcased over 40 investments in co-investment convenings and published four reports on topics like enterprise support and tactics for advancing social equity through impact investing.

 

New Reports Take Critical Steps Towards Impact Benchmarks and Ratings

The GIIN just released Understanding Impact Performance: Agriculture Investments and Understanding Impact Performance: Financial Inclusion Investments, which follow last year’s inception of the Impact Performance Studies series. The groundbreaking studies represent the industry’s first collaborative effort to advance impact performance comparisons, and the first reports last year focused on clean energy access and housing. Now, these latest reports on agriculture and financial inclusion build upon the analytical model established in the first installments of the series. By examining specific sectors, these reports are helping the industry better understand the real-world results of impact investments.

In November, the GIIN will also release its Methodology for Standardizing and Comparing Impact Performance. This discussion paper will act as an “instruction manual” and will lay out each step of the analytic methodology the GIIN has developed to assess aggregate market-, portfolio-, and investment-level analysis. Taken in combination, the methodology and thematic reports lay the foundation for impact benchmarks, ratings, and other tools for analyzing and managing impact performance.

In addition to the published resources, there is an interactive tool to analyze custom cuts of data available on the GIIN website. This tool allows investors to explore key impact performance indicators and progress towards impact in agriculture and financial inclusion.

To get involved or participate in ongoing data collection efforts, please reach out to [email protected].

Read the reports and interact with report data

New Resources Guide Investors Focused on Climate Change Mitigation

With the realities of climate change growing more obvious, impact investors are more committed than ever on mitigating climate change: 68% of respondents to the GIIN’s 2020 Annual Impact Investor Survey target this in their investments. That’s why the GIIN has partnered with Ceres, a sustainability nonprofit building leadership and driving solutions throughout the economy, to develop the new Climate Change Mitigation theme in the Navigating Impact Project. This theme draws on the collective knowledge and experience of a diverse set of 180+ stakeholders to help investors select impact strategies and adopt metrics that track performance toward their climate change mitigation goals.

WATCH NOW: The GIIN and Ceres teams hosted a launch webinar to highlight what’s included in the theme and how it can be applied.

New Episode of GIIN’s Next Normal Podcast Launches

Keep an eye on your favorite podcast platform as we launch a new episode of the GIIN’s podcast, Next Normal: Re-imagining Capitalism for Our Future! In Episode 4, Amit is joined by a leading voice in the push toward a new economy, Mike Kubzansky. Mike is the CEO of Omidyar Network, a social change venture established by Pam and Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. With that deep heritage in the tech world, Mike and his team are positioned as insiders in the world of markets and capitalism: “We are fundamentally capitalists, who do want to re-imagine capitalism.” In this episode, Mike guides us through the five pillars of change required to build a new economy.

Download and subscribe to Next Normal wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher.

GIIN Member Highlight: New Forests Champions Innovative Impact Investing Strategies in Real Assets

As a new feature in the GIIN newsletter, we will be sharing the work of GIIN members and how they are contributing to the growth of the industry.

New Forests is a sustainable real assets investment manager offering leading-edge strategies in forestry, land management, and conservation focused on the Asia-Pacific region since 2005.

Since joining GIIN membership in 2014, New Forests has been a contributor to several areas of the GIIN’s work. The team has been active in membership activities on blended finance and has contributed firm insights and data to GIIN research and IRIS+. They played an instrumental role in developing the core metric sets and content for the sustainable forestry, sustainable water management, and climate change mitigation themes. They engage with the GIIN in both North America and the Asia-Pacific region. Through these activities, New Forests has shared their expertise as an impact investor with others who may be newer to the field and has engaged with other industry leaders to strengthen the impact investing market.

“As a GIIN member, New Forests not only has access to the group’s growing body of resources, impact investing data, and leading IRIS+ metrics, but we are able to actively work together with the GIIN team and our peers in continuing to build these resources. GIIN’s efforts to extend these resources to include the growing forestry asset class has been particularly useful – we can now use a common nomenclature when talking about sustainable forestry and measure outcomes with the IRIS+ core metric sets. As an investment manager, this helps New Forests advance conversations with our clients around how impact investments in sustainable forestry can meet their combined financial and impact objectives, such as climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation.” – MaryKate Bullen, Director – Sustainability & Communications, New Forests

New Forests’ investment strategies employ a long-term view of economic and market trends with an emphasis on positive environmental, social, and development outcomes. Impact investing is an important component of the company’s corporate purpose: investing to create productive and sustainable landscapes – for the benefit of its investor and the communities where it operates. Their assets include sustainable timber plantations, forest carbon offset projects, rural land, and conservation investments related to ecosystem restoration and protection.

Interested in becoming a GIIN member? Learn more