Climate change is a defining issue of our time, and the global financial community has responded with a series of investing frameworks, stock exchanges and activities to encourage private investment in climate change-focused initiatives. Despite these efforts, evidence suggests we are still off track to hit global targets. TIIP’s William Burckart and Steve Lydenberg discuss in NextBillion their new report, which advocates a new paradigm for measuring the effectiveness of investing in SDGs – and uses climate change investment to illustrate how this approach could work.
From the op-ed: “Despite this increasing private sector interest in investing in these issues and investor “alignment” with the SDGs, growing evidence suggests we are still off track to hit related targets like The Paris Agreement. Paris, of course, was a global action plan adopted in 2015 that all countries agreed to work to limit global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius and whose implementation is essential for the achievement of the SDGs. Failing to meet those targets elevates the likelihood that wildfires, sea level rises, crop failures and other destabilizing climate-related risks will only continue to intensify. It’s also worth noting that global emissions increased for the first time in three years. Part of the problem is that few investors have attempted to measure whether they are meaningfully contributing to progress toward achieving the goals…” Read more
