Today’s guest is Clara Barby, and it’s a big one, as she’s been a central player in climate impact investing for decades, and in this conversation she offers a compelling case for the power of ‘climate-led’ investing to not only revolutionise high-emissions industries, but also its potential to deliver competitive returns to a stable of institutional investors.
We speak about both the climate-tech companies that are creating disruptive new industrial technologies. But we also explore the cutting-edge emissions measurement models the team uses to forecast the emissions avoidance potential of a company.
It goes further than relying on backward looking measures of scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. And it represents important progress in GHG accounting, with huge potential as a driver of returns as it unearths exciting new leaders in the new climate-led industrial revolution.
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On this episode…
We explore Clara’s journey through the world of impact: early on she worked at Acumen, she then moved on to Bridges Fund Management, and she’s currently Senior Partner at Just Climate which was spun-out of Generation Investment Management, the sustainable investment firm launched by none other than Al Gore.
But that’s not all, along the way she’s helped develop standard setting organisations like the Impact Management Project (the IMP) and the global sustainability accounting body, the ISSB.
We also dive-in to Just Climate’s investment approach. It is only two years old and has already closed its first fund, raising a cool $US1.5 billion.
Their first fund is focussed on industrial decarbonisation in hard-to-abate sectors. And they’ve followed it up with a Natural-Climate Strategy, focusing on avoiding emissions from agriculture and forestry, as well as sequestering emissions through restoration of soil, forests and wetlands.
My key takeaway this week…
“If you’re asking whether we can collect data that has enough precision for the decision, and can that data have some level of assurance? Yes, we’re getting there.
It’s not always of the same nature as some of the financial data, but in terms of its quality being something you can rely on to make better decisions, yes, we are getting there.”
“It’s about widening the aperture, it’s about paying attention to a wider set of information than perhaps we have been doing before.”
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By Hannah Gold
“I have to admit I’m in a chapter of my life where I have four young kids ranging from six to 11, so my bedtime reading is lying in bed reading books to them. And so I’m going to tell all the parents out there that Hannah Gold is a wonderful author who has managed to write about nature in a way that is a story, but it gets kids to realize that even the small things they do count.”
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