13 March 2025
James Corah, Head of Sustainability

Lent is often seen as a period of abstinence, a time that tests one’s discipline. Can you go without chocolate for 40+ days? The answer is, in my case, often no. But instead of seeing it as a negative, when it comes to sustainable investment, it offers us a chance, as an industry, to step back and reflect on what really matters.

Of late, sustainable investment has come under attack from all angles. It’s been criticised for being an ideology and a fad. It’s simultaneously drawn scorn for being about changing the world (rather than about promoting investment returns) and been pilloried for being about investment returns (when it should be about changing the world). Right now, it seems, sustainable investment just cannot win.

But I believe the distance Lent brings can help us cut through the noise and see how sustainable investment can still help clients. If you can see past the veneer that parts of the industry have created, done right, sustainable investment offers charities, churches and individual investors the opportunity to better connect who they are with their money. Very few people want to give up returns, but at the same time – when asked – most people would want their money to be managed in a way that they can be proud of.

So, if we as an investment industry can genuinely cut through the noise and take sustainable investing back to where it began - helping people connect their values with their money - we can all win.

So, this year let’s embrace Lent. Not for the miserable chocolatey mess I have already succumbed to only a little while after Shrove Tuesday, but for the opportunity to reflect and get back to basics. Let’s see sustainable investment as an opportunity to target both financial returns and making a difference.  

2024 in detail

We have published our Better World 2024 Sustainable Investment Outcomes Report.

This provides a detailed overview of our sustainable investment activities and what they achieved during the year.
 

Read the full report here

Key milestones

  • We spoke at the launch of the Platform Living Wage Financials Annual Report. This initiative aims to bring together financial services companies to push companies in the apparel and agricultural sectors to offer living wages to workers in their supply chains. This is a key part of our engagement programme. Our work to push NIKE (no longer a holding) to better support garment workers in Cambodia and Thailand is showcased within the report. To download the Platform for Living Wage Financials annual report and learn more about our engagement with NIKE, please click here
  • We met with McDonalds to discuss the company’s impact on biodiversity and the risk that a degrading natural environment might pose to their business. We were pleased to learn that the company had appointed a new chief sustainability officer and are undertaking a wider assessment on their impact.

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