This week, with another 42% of the year still to go, July 29th, marked Earth Overshoot Day, the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year. “While last year we thought that the Corona crisis would mark a point where we could change course and make our system more sustainable, Earth Overshoot Day shows us that we missed that chance completely,” said Hans Stegeman Chief Investment Strategist at Triodos Investment Management on this occasion. Meanwhile, at the G20 meeting on Energy and Climate in Naples last Friday, the participants could not agree to stop funding coal nor on a deadline to phase out fossil fuel.
In Sweden, we caught up with Erik Norland who is joining V-Square Quantitative Management, a firm founded last year by Mamadou-Abou Sarr. Also in Sweden, the Swedish Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (SVCA) launched the first joint sustainability report for the Swedish private equity industry, in an attempt to create a new approach to systematically monitor, measure and clarify key sustainability-related figures in Swedish portfolio companies.
Meanwhile, Norway, together with co-funding countries Liechtenstein and Iceland, decided to withdraw NOK2.3 billion in funding from The EEA and Norway Grants scheme to Hungary following a disagreement over the administration of the funds.
Also this week, Schroders‘s impact boutique BlueOrchard secured the second close of its Covid-19 Emerging and Frontier Markets MSME Support Fund launched at the end of 2020. Last but not least, this week’s Snap column discusses the good, the bad and the ugly in the light of an investor’s view of a Legal & General Chinese ESG bond ETF which holds precisely the same four Chinese government or quasi-government issuers as a typical non-ESG China government bond ETF.