Investing: U.N. Launches Principles for Responsible Investment

"With only rare exceptions, the financial community has not sufficiently recognized or rewarded corporate efforts to respond to environmental, labor or human rights challenges, even though such factors can be directly material to corporate performance," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said when he announced the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment, according to GreenBiz.com.

The heads of leading institutions from 16 countries, representing more than $4 trillion in assets owned, have signed the Principles.

The Principles recognize that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues can affect business profits and portfolio performance. Six overarching principles, underpinned by 35 possible actions, guide institutional investors and asset managers in practicing responsible investment. The Principles are designed to encourage the integration of ESG issues into investment analysis, stimulate active ownership and proxy voting, and improve ESG disclosure by companies.

The Principles were developed during a nearly year-long process convened by the U.N. Secretary-General and coordinated by the U.N. Environment Program Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) and the U.N. Global Compact.

Read the full story: Principles

Categories: investing, sri, csr

Biofuels: Concern Over Ethanol Production's Impact on Poor

NEW YORK - The race to boost ethanol production could one day hurt food supply for many of the world's poor, an environmental expert said on Thursday, according to a report in Reuters/Planet Ark.

"This is shaping up as competition between the 800 million people in the world that own automobiles and the 2 billion low- income people in the world, many of whom are already spending over half their income on food," Lester Brown, president of Washington D.C.-based environmental research group Earth Policy Institute, told reporters on a teleconference.
Ethanol production is booming in Brazil and the United States amid record oil prices, a shortage in refinery capacity for production of conventional motor fuels, and increasing fuel demand.

Brazil, the world's leading ethanol producer, uses sugarcane to make the fuel. Prices for sugar futures in February hit a 25-year high of nearly 20 cents per pound, on ethanol demand and as big money funds came into the market.

In the United States, the world's largest corn exporter, high subsidies for making ethanol are also encouraging a rush to corn, as everyone from Bill Gates to investment banks invest in ethanol plants.

Read the full story: Ethanol Boom

Categories: alternativeenergy, biofuels, poverty

New! Green Skeptic "Personal Best" Squidoo Lens Created

Searching for that article I wrote about Iqbal Quadir? (It's now required reading for an Internet & Society course at Harvard, by the way.)

Ever wonder what I consider my top 5 posts?

Looking for all the posts I've written on Climate Change or Social Entrepreneurs, but don't want to slog through Bloggers' Archives system? (Fix it guys and get categories already!)

Well, now you can find what you want, thanks to Squidoo. I've just launched The Green Skeptic's Personal Best lens on Squidoo. Check it out and don't forget to rank it -- all proceeds go to the Acumen Fund.

And while you're there, check out my Social Entrepreneurs' lens, called Changemakers. It crossed into the top 500 Squidoo lenses this week!

Oh and if you decide to create your own lens, tell 'em I sent you...

Thanks for reading...and my apologies for getting sidetracked with all this building of other sites. I'll be back to my regular stream of articles shortly.

Be well. Do Good Work.

Scott

Climate Change: Hedge Funds Turn Greed to Green

NEW YORK - Clean energy projects may not only reduce global warming, but could also help patient hedge funds make money, according to an author of a book on funds, according to Reuters/Planet Ark.

Some funds are investing in projects that cut emissions of greenhouse gases in order to earn cheap emissions credits that could be worth much more in the future, said Peter Fusaro, co-author of "Energy & Environmental Hedge Funds."

Such projects range from turning crop waste into fuel or capturing potent greenhouse gas leaking from landfills.

"This is a pure trading mentality, not an altruistic value of saving the world," said Fusaro, co-principal of New York-based consultancy Energy Hedge Fund Center LLC.

With environment investments, the trick is hedge funds must often have the patience to wait a few years between sinking money in projects and profiting from them.

He said before the Kyoto Protocol on global warming was launched in 2005, Dutch investors picked up emissions credits for about five euros a tonne and then profited when carbon prices shot higher.

Read the full story here: Green Hedge

Categories: climatechange, economy, investments

Climate Change: Energy Bumps Issue from the G8 Agenda

ROME - At the last G8 summit, political leaders vowed to "act with resolve and urgency" on climate change. A year on, global warming has been sidelined by concerns on how the world can satisfy its growing appetite for energy, according to Reuters/Planet Ark.

While analysts were not entirely convinced by Prime Minister Tony Blair's bid to highlight climate change -- a fashionable issue in Britain -- during his G8 presidency, they believe Russia has all but dropped the issue.
"I don't think this year there's going to be any particular emphasis on climate, I would be very positively surprised if there were," said Benito Mueller, Senior Research Fellow at Britain's Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Russia, chairing the Group of Eight for the first time and hosting a summit starting July 15, has been ambivalent about global warming which leaders at last year's G8 summit called "a serious and long-term challenge that has the potential to affect every part of the planet".

Moscow's decision in 2004 to ratify the Kyoto Protocol saved the greenhouse gas-limiting treaty from collapse, which looked likely when the United States pulled out three years earlier.

Read the full story: G8

Categories: climatechange, globalization

Biofuels: Need More Investments as Demands Rise

BRUSSELS - Very few countries have enough raw material available at present to produce biofuels that could compete on price with fossil fuels without government subsidies, a major agricultural study said on Tuesday, acording to Reuters/Planet Ark.

"In only very few countries is the required feedstock available at prices that would presently allow ethanol and biodiesel production to be competitive with transport fuels from crude oil without government support," it said.
"But such support can also create market distortions, the nature and level of which need to be well understood before policies are put in place," said the study, authored jointly by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). And although it forecast an acceleration in world biofuel usage over the next 10 years that would raise demand for maize, wheat, oilseeds and sugar, the trade-offs between food/feed and non-food uses for specific crop sectors were still unclear.

This included changes in the preferred farm-based feedstock used to make biofuels to non-agricultural products such as cellulosic fibres and waste materials, the OECD-FAO study said.

Read the full story: Biofuels

Categories: alternativeenergy, biofuels, innovation