Alba Forns is the co-founder and COO of Climatize, an impact-investing platform that empowers people to fund solar projects with the potential to earn a return on their money. Equities News asked Forns to share her journey so far and how she hopes to revolutionize the impact-investing landscape.
The story behind Climatize
From a very young age, Forns said she felt deeply connected with nature and knew she wanted to change the world for the better. With a background in engineering, her climate anxiety led her to pursue two masters degrees, in renewable energy and sustainability.
Forns jumped into climate activism during her studies. She organized beach clean-ups, joined an organization named Rena Mälaren (now Hands2Ocean, H2O) in Sweden to remove waste from lakes, and even met Greta Thunberg when she lived in Stockholm. She attended the weekly Fridays for Future protests in front of the Swedish Parliament.
A climate protest led Forns and her Climatize co-founder, Will Wiseman, to start their company. They saw 100,000 people protesting for climate action. Although they felt empowered during the protest, they left feeling like nothing had changed. That protest spurred their desire to enable people to turn their climate anxiety into action by investing directly in renewable energy projects.
They met later that week to discuss how they could enable people to make actionable change and through weeks of brainstorming, came up with the concept of Climatize. This platform enables users to invest directly into solar energy projects, with minimum investments as low as $10.
Alba Forns
Why impact investing?
As Forns mentions in her recently published article “Bridging the climate financing gap: seizing the opportunity,” achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 will require nearly $200 trillion in new investment globally, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Meanwhile, COP28 ended with a call to transition away from fossil fuels and triple renewable energy by 2030.
“The end of the fossil-fuel era and the dawn of the clean-energy revolution will largely depend on our ability to mobilize capital. My mission is to bridge the climate financing gap by empowering people to easily and transparently invest in renewable energy projects,” Forns said.
Since launching in May 2023, over $3 million has been invested in solar projects via the Climatize platform. These projects go beyond climate impact; they directly benefit frontline communities, ranging from community solar for low-income families to a third-generation women-led family farm.
A natural entrepreneur
Forns considers herself a “natural entrepreneur”. She always knew she wanted to start her own company and follow her father’s footsteps, though she didn’t expect it to come so soon.
“Without actively looking for it, I came across a problem to solve, a powerhouse co-founder and an idea worth pursuing, so I decided to go for it,” she said. “There’s something very beautiful about building something that aligns with your values from scratch.”
When asked what the most valuable skills an entrepreneur should possess, she answers: “without a doubt, passion, resilience and hard work.” But she points out that entrepreneurship can be isolating and so it’s important to surround yourself with people with high energy and ambition who are going through the same journey.
One of Climatize’s current investment offerings
Increasing diversity in the workplace
Only one in five leadership roles in the energy sector are held by women, according to the World Economic Forum. Underrepresentation in leadership positions underscores women’s challenges in rising to high-ranking positions within the industry, but this didn’t scare Forns away. It fueled her ambition.
“Fighting for climate justice and inclusion is my life mission, and Climatize is the current incarnation of that,” says Alba.
Aside from her work in climate, Alba has actively promoted diversity and inclusion. While working as an energy consultant, she helped organize workshops through a program called INSPIRA that empowered girls to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) careers.
Today, she is actively involved in women’s groups in climate. She is involved with Women and Climate, Women in Cleantech and Sustainability and is the communications co-chair and steering committee member of the WRISE San Diego Chapter. She also engages with female technologists and climate entrepreneurs by providing coaching and mentoring, ensuring they feel heard, supported and empowered.
“My co-founder and I are very proud of the culture we’ve built and the talent we have been able to attract. Our team includes people from all walks of life, female representation, people of color, LGBTQ+ and diversity in age.”
Among the accolades for Forns: She is Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Impact 2023, a Young Energy Ambassador for the European Commission, a 2nd prize winner of the distinguished EIT Changemaker awards 2024 and has been nominated for the Earthshot Prize 2024. On a personal note, she is an avid runner and speaks 6 languages.
If health is wealth, America’s working mothers are living in extreme poverty. That’s the headline on a white paper written by Ann Somers Hogg, director of health-care research at the Clayton Christensen Institute. I recently spoke with Somers Hogg about the conditions working mothers face in the U.S., conditions that create $55 billion in lost productivity each year due simply to school calendars.
“Top line, working mothers are disproportionately bearing the burden of poor physical health, poor mental health, and this is on top of the economic burdens that are amplified by parenthood,” Somers Hogg said on an episode of my Money Life podcast.
“One is not an employee from 9 a .m. to 5 p .m. and a mother from 5 p .m. to 9 a .m. because the school calendar doesn’t align to the workday. And it also doesn’t align on an annual schedule. In the working world in the United States, we don’t have a summer break” she told me.
Ann Somers Hogg
“And the conflict, this loss productivity arises not just from the conflict in an average workday, but also from the fact that when children are sick and they have to miss school, mothers are generally the first line of defense. They get the call before the fathers do usually. A lot of households in the United States are led by single mothers. So there is only one option for calling” she said,
Those conflicts are not the only ones taking a toll on the health of working mothers.
“Right now in our society, we have a lack of agreement on both the root causes and the goals of addressing the maternal health problem. Nationally, we do tend to agree on the fact that our maternal mortality is bad and we should work to reduce maternal mortality in the first year of the woman's life after she gives birth” Somers Hogg said.
“But what I’m talking about in this report is actually the health of the mother over the life of the parent and why this is such an issue for not just the individual, but for families, for employers, and for the nation as a whole.”
U.S. investors soured on sustainability in the first quarter of 2024, with a record $8.8 billion being pulled from funds that focus on impact, a new report from Morningstar shows.
Despite the drag from the United States numbers, sustainable funds globally attracted nearly $900 million in new money in January, February and March. That represented a rebound from the end of 2023, when $88 million was withdrawn from those funds, Morningstar found.
The fund tracker defines the global sustainable fund universe as open-end funds and exchange-traded funds that, by prospectus or other regulatory filings, claim to focus on sustainability, impact or environmental, social and governance factors.
Worldwide, just short of $3 trillion was invested in those funds at the end of the quarter, with the vast bulk of that figure, $2.5 trillion, represented by Europe. U.S. investors own $335 billion in such assets, Morningstar’s data show.
“Boosted mostly by the asset growth among European passive strategies, global sustainable fund assets inched up by 1.8% at the end of the first quarter,” the report said. That gain came “against a mixed macroeconomic backdrop, including the uncertain inflation and interest rates prospects, the artificial intelligence boom, as well as continued geopolitical risks.”
Less interest in sustainable funds resulted in a record low debut of new funds focused on impact and ESG. Morningstar said only 97 such funds were added in the first quarter, down from 176 in the fourth quarter of 2023. And the reduction in sustainable fund launches wasn’t limited to the U.S.: The trend was seen across the globe, the report found.
U.S. asset manager BlackRock remains the dominant force in sustainable funds, with $368 billion under management. Amundi and UBS, the two largest European firms in the space, have $177 billion and $171 billion, respectively, under management.
Here are the top 10 U.S. sustainable funds bringing in the most investor money in Q1:
Other highlights from the report:
European sustainable funds registered almost $11 billion of inflows, more than double the subscriptions of the previous quarter.
Japanese sustainable funds recorded outflows of $1.7 billion.
Canada collected $188 million in the first quarter of 2024. Other markets marginally helping the recovery of sustainable fund flows globally were Asia ex-Japan, which garnered $243 million, while Australia and New Zealand registered $26 million of combined inflows.
Satya Tripathi wants you to see the Earth as a jigsaw puzzle. Not one where you have to put the pieces together to get the real picture, but one in which the puzzle is being dismantled before your eyes.
“Take a jigsaw puzzle of our planet, an amazing planet, and you’ll have amazing pieces to fit there. Rivers, oceans, land, people, 8 million species, and they all exist in perfect harmony. That’s nature’s jigsaw,” said Tripathi, the Secretary-General of the Global Alliance for a Sustainable Planet.
But “we are unraveling it piece by piece without even understanding what the picture is. So that’s the challenge for humanity. We really need to see the big picture,” he told FinTech TV’s Vince Molinari in a recent episode of The Impact.
Tripathi, who is also the chancellor at the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences and spent 20 years at the United Nations, warns that climate change is becoming more destructive.
“Until early last year, say a year ago, you would struggle to find any weatherman or weatherwoman really talking about atmospheric rivers or rivers in the sky, as some may call it. If you are not mindful of it, if you do not understand what it does to you, you will have the kind of disturbances that you are seeing now on the west coast of the United States,” he said.
“The disturbances, the global warming, will take it (the water) all away and pour it in places that neither have a drainage system nor the ability to process it in terms of absorbing capacity of the land. And that’s how you have these floods where roads and highways and bridges and everything literally washed away,” Tripathi told Molinari.
“It’s a challenge of where does the water fall and that you don’t control. That’s up to nature to decide. There’s all kinds of natural forces at play. You really don’t control it. So the best thing to do is prevent global warming.”
Ansa, a startup company that provides fintech infrastructure which enables merchants to launch branded customer wallets, has secured a $14 million Series A funding round, the company announced this week. The round was led by Renegade Partners with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, B37 Ventures, Box Group and Wischoff Ventures.
The investment round was notable for the fact that more than 95% of the funding came from female investors, Ansa said. The funding will be used to broaden the depth of Ansa’s payment solutions, with a focus on product development and engineering, to empower merchants to better engage their customers.
Sophia Goldberg
“Commerce has outpaced payments innovation. The technology paradigms we use for payments are decades old,” Sophia Goldberg, CEO and co-founder of Ansa, said in a press release. “As our world increasingly digitizes, consumers demand better experiences as businesses continue to innovate. Both consumers and merchants deserve more flexibility, which is why we built Ansa.”
Merchants spend more than $138 billion annually on fees, the National Retail Federation reports. Microtransactions and small transaction volume payments, such as a $4 latte purchase, can incur additional costs exceeding 12.5%, Goldberg pointed out. Costs are going up across the board as inflation and high interest rates impact businesses, which according to recent Forrester research may discourage consumer spending and decrease sales volume.
With Ansa’s branded customer wallets, merchants can seamlessly integrate customer balances with rewards, incentives and their other loyalty initiatives — easily implementing a Starbucks app-like experience. Platform users have experienced a significant 30% boost in average order frequency and a notable 26% increase in revenue, Ansa said.
“Ansa is setting a new standard for how we’ll all transact in the future, with a pioneering payments solution that lets merchants trade burdensome credit card processing fees for increased customer lifetime value,” said Renata Quintini of Renegade Partners, who joins Ansa’s board.
Ansa has raised a total of $19.6 million, 95.6% of which has come from female investors. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company was founded by Goldberg, the author of “The Field Guide to Global Payments” and previously at Adyen, and J.T. Cho, a fintech veteran and lead engineer at Affirm and Google.
Despite slowing growth rates and skepticism among many U.S. investors, ESG assets worldwide have already surpassed $30 trillion and are on track to reach $40 trillion by 2030, Bloomberg Intelligence ESG data show.
“ESG has had a tough few years, but we see the market entering a necessary consolidation phase, marked by slower growth and maturity,” said Adeline Diab, global ESG research and strategy director at Bloomberg Intelligence.
Younger investors, especially, like environment, social and governance funds because they focus on long-term benefits for the planet. These investors often pick investments based on how sustainable they think they are, she said.
Companies that receive strong ESG performance ratings usually emphasize investments in renewable energy or policies that make the company’s environmental impact much smaller. For long-term financial gains, these investments look at ethical and environmentally friendly ways to do business.
Here are 7 stocks to consider if ESG is among your investing values:
1. Adobe
Adobe
ADBE
has a diverse leadership team and equal pay for men and women around the world. By 2035, the company wants to run its business on 100% renewable energy. Because of these things, Adobe has a top AAA ESG rating. This is because of its good governance and special social programs.
Adobe reported bigger profits in the first quarter of 2024, up 11% to $5.18 billion. Even though it had to pay a $1 billion termination fee to get out of its failed purchase of Figma, this growth was still driven by its strong digital media business and ability to make money.
2. Intuit
Intuit
INTU
wants to be more environmentally friendly, so by 2030 it wants to use only renewable energy and reduce its carbon footprint. The company’s AAA MSCI ESG ratings show that it is a leader in human capital, moral governance, and reducing the effects of climate change. Comprehensive HR policies help employees’ mental health, well-being, and work-life balance by being open and supportive.
On the financials side, Intuit’s net sales and profits rose to $3.386 billion and $353 million, respectively, in the second quarter of its fiscal year 2024. This was due to strategic innovations and better market positioning. Sales are expected to rise 11%–12% to $15.890 billion to $16.105 billion for the fiscal year.
3. Nike
Nike
NKE
is moving to more eco-friendly materials like recycled polyester and nylon, sustainable cotton and new lower-impact products such as Nike Flyknit and Nike Flyleather as part of its push to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The company plans to recycle 80% of its manufacturing waste into new Nike products and other uses to extend product life and reduce its environmental impact. The leftover scrap won’t be dumped.
After pivoting on its direct-to-consumer strategy at the end of 2023, Nike’s wholesale sales fell 3% in the second quarter of fiscal 2024, although revenue rose to $13.4 billion. Improved third-quarter results showed the economy’s resilience and the effectiveness of targeted cost reductions and operational efficiency, which will save $2 billion over three years.
4. HPE
HPE
HPE
aims to reduce carbon pollution and promote resource-efficient technology. To improve social and environmental benefits, HPE has incorporated education and freedom into its core values. HPE demonstrated its co-engineered AI-native solutions, business AI, deep learning, and machine learning operationalization at the NVIDIA GTC. These major advances demonstrate how HPE uses cutting-edge technology to boost output and achieve its ethical and environmental goals.
This year, HPE predicted first-quarter sales of $7.11 billion, down from $7.4 billion last year. The company said EPS would drop from $0.63 to $0.45. Even in a bad economy, HPE’s $14 billion purchase of Juniper Networks boosts its networking and AI capabilities. HPE believes Juniper’s AI-native Mist AI and Cloud platform will triple its networking revenue.
5. Salesforce
Salesforce
CRM
has enhanced its ESG practices to demonstrate sustainability and social justice. Replanting and universal renewable energy use have cut company carbon emissions. Salesforce also promotes workplace equality, minority training, and AI governance reform for fairness and transparency. Salesforce offers sustainability cloud solutions to help companies assess and reduce their carbon footprints to net-zero by 2040.
Salesforce exceeded revenue and profit expectations in the current fiscal quarter due to cloud-based remote work solutions and global workplace transitions. CEO Marc Benioff streamlined corporate leadership and strategic decision-making after Bret Taylor’s departure, boosting efficiency.
Recent financial reports show strong sales and profitability for Microsoft’s cloud services and Office products for remote work. Microsoft optimized Windows 11’s speed and interface to boost productivity. Microsoft also said it would buy Activision Blizzard for $70 billion to improve its gaming and metaverse businesses.
7. Nvidia
Nvdia
NVDA
wants to use only green energy and its GPUs are energy-efficient. The GeForce RTX 40 series has revolutionized professional graphics and gaming, making Nvidia the AI and gameplay leader. Altogether, Nvidia’s energy-efficient products and AI solutions for health care and climate issues demonstrate its environmental commitment.
NVIDIA’s finances are good due to AI and game sales, leading to a $1 trillion market cap in 2023, fueled by the generative AI boom. This rise shows how much IT and entertainment need new computer technologies. NVIDIA’s stock price has risen because investors trust its market plan and leadership.
Last week, in Part 1 of our conversation with Kristin Hull, she shared her origin story and told us about the work that Nia Impact Capital does. Today, in Part 2, we dive in deeper and explore some of the challenges that women in finance face to this day—but also celebrate the wins that Kristin’s team has achieved.
Equities Staff: What makes Nia unique in the world of finance in general and impact investment in particular?
Kristin Hull: We’re women-led, so that makes us very, very, very unique. We’re in that 0.7% … less than 1%. We’re unique by having a woman founder and also by having women portfolio managers and women in leadership. One of our portfolio managers is a black man, so that also makes us unique, to have people of color in leadership and asset management. So just who we are, makes us unique.
Then there’s the fact that we’re not doing finance as usual. I believe we’re one of the only firms out there that understands that finance is a really strong tool and that we can harness it for social gains, social justice gains and environmental sustainability. And then we want to empower our clients. A lot of asset management firms want to serve their clients, and yet the knowledge stays at the firm and [doesn’t get transferred] to the clients. We really want our clients empowered. So that makes us a little bit different.
And then, as far as public equities are concerned, we do seek to be in relationship with every one of our companies, so we reach out and engage as often as we can to help these companies be better.
ES: What would you say has been your toughest challenge in doing this work?
Kristin Hull
KH: Oh, my [laughs]. Our toughest challenge… it happens every day. You know, we are women in asset management, and we are in an incumbent economy. So it’s on daily! The patriarchy is alive and well; the status quo is pretty strong. Navigating our way through that is intense.
ES: Do you feel that on your personal level, or do you think your entire team feels that?
KH: That’s a good question. I am probably the most outward facing. Anybody who deals with the big banks is used to getting a ‘no.’ So we’ve got to hang in there and work towards a ‘yes,’ or find another way to do it. Who can we go around, who can we bring into the conversation, for whatever it is we need? Yeah, I think I probably feel it the most.
ES: In your field, the field of finance and investment, what specifically makes you have to fight all that much harder?
KH: There’s a woman that I know named Samantha—actually I know a few people named Samantha who go by Sam, who very specifically sign their communications ‘Sam’ and they get more meetings. They don’t get blocked from the meetings. I don’t know that our business would be that much more successful if I signed my name Chris, but it’s very tangible—the male female difference, the bias against women in the space, that is for sure.
And then there’s the fact I’m trying to do not just regular asset management. I’m trying to challenge what has worked for the dominant culture for so long, or for the very few. We’re bringing in a gender lens. We are looking at every lever we can pull for racial equity in asset management. We want our companies to be the very best on environmental sustainability. We do believe that that is a winning business model. And we’re not asking them to do anything that would inhibit them receiving more return on investment, having a stronger brand—all those things. There are multiple layers to what we’re trying to do and we’re in a minority position trying to do it.
ES: What will it take for women to succeed? Is it simply more companies like Nia or is there more to it—because, as we all know, a woman has two problems in the office. One is the patriarchy and the second is other women who might be trying to keep her down.
KH: Oh, absolutely. There’s no mean girl culture at Nia—we support each other for each other.
Part of the patriarchy is that we feel separated and a lot of women feel alone. They feel that they’re the only ones that don’t know how to do their investing. And yet, you know, very few of us were taught this in college, and certainly not in high school. A lot of this you learn at the dinner table or in some kind of group setting. It’s not something you learn alone. So if you weren’t included in that conversation, the patriarchy places this layer of shame on you, because you don’t know it.
We’re trying to break that layer down, and provide education and make sure everyone knows that we’re in this together. We’re also trying to create the most transparent, easy-to-understand portfolios and talk people through them—and then of course our activism gives people hooks to hang them on. These are companies they’ve heard of. So now they learn about forced arbitration and why it’s bad or why it’s associated with sexual harassment or racial discrimination. And they say, ‘Oh, I don’t want that in my contract. And hey look, Nia’s working on that.’ Diverse reporting is probably easier to understand, especially for women who want to be counted. So those types of things become more tangible. And then the other thing that’s going to help us be successful is the wealth transfer. Have you been watching that?
KH: Yeah—so basically, either through inheritance and/or women earning their own wealth, there’s trillions of dollars transferring to women and they’re going to be making investment decisions, and the investment industry is going to have to change. It cannot stay in the status quo, where we don’t have women in leadership.
As investors, we’re just not trained to be conscious of who manages our mutual funds, who’s choosing the companies—it’s not something that’s on our radar. So we’re trying to enable women and all investors to own what they own. And that means really knowing what they own; then they can direct their money towards the solutions and the things that they care about, that they know will be good for their communities.
ES: Do you see that number ticking up or are we still facing strong headwinds?
KH: The status quo is strong! And yet with the current wealth transfer underway, we are seeing more women and younger people in charge of investment decisions—and with that wave, we are ready to see these numbers change. Our economy and our planet need a more diverse set of decision makers when it comes to deciding which companies get capital, and get included in investment portfolios and which do not.
ES: And how do you see the next five to ten years in this sector, in responsible investing?
KH: It’s growing. It’s growing despite what you read or hear about the ESG backlash, and of course the DEI mess. We get the economy and the world that we invest into. So by shifting our investments, we can make a huge difference. It’s kind of silly, but like they did in that movie [‘Back to the Future’], things you do in the past impact the future. What I want us to do is take that metaphor and say, if we change our investments right now, the world is going to be different. It’s going to be more and more important that we really understand the connection. I say this all the time, and it seems obvious, and yet it’s still so tangential in our society.
If women said, ‘we are only investing in portfolios led by women,’ that would change the economy immediately. If Melinda Gates said to her investment advisor, ‘I will only invest in companies that have women in leadership,’ the entire economy would change.Obviously, if Melinda Gates does it, it’s a big change, but it also sends a signal to everybody else.
We’ve got the young people not wanting to vote for Biden because of Gaza. That’s a wake-up message to a lot of us: they’re already coming to us mainly because of the environment but then also the racial justice issues they care about. The industry is not ready for them. It’s gonna be a tidal wave.
ES: You know, between Melinda and Mackenzie… if they just decided to do exactly what you just said, that would create a tsunami.
Nia Impact Capital photo
KH: Oh, absolutely. I’ve heard Melinda say this on stage—I don’t remember the exact statistics but basically, when she graduated from computer science, women were about 30% of computer science grads, and now it’s gone down. I think she said it was 17% or 18%. For me, the answer is, if you want women trained in computer science, then have every single one of the investments that you own in companies that have computer science training programs for women. There you go. Done DONE! Melinda can literally change exactly what she wants to do. She just has to put the investment out there. Women [like her] hold so much power.
ES: What would you say to all the generations of young women now starting their careers in this space?
KH: I would say to bring their full selves, and that their analysis matters. Our whole economy is resting on this “modern” portfolio theory, this school of thought that came out of the University of Chicago in the 50’s and 60’s. Maybe it was modern at the time; it’s definitely not modern now. It didn’t take into consideration that we live on an Earth with finite resources. Those white men sitting at that table believed that we live on an earth with infinite resources, and that returns could be infinite; and our entire capitalist economic theory is written based on principles that were never true. And women knew that then—that’s the totally bizarre piece of it.
So bringing what you know and questioning the status quo is going to be our best bet. We’re living in a house of cards, and it’s going to require taking some of these nature-based solutions and bringing them into our economy.
ES: For someone who’s fairly new to investing, how can they start with you?
KH: We specialize in public equities and just about everybody has room for public equities in their portfolio. If someone already works with a financial adviser, we offer separately managed accounts that they can get through their financial adviser so they don’t have to come directly to us.
Going to our website is a great start. It’s a new site and we’re still working on putting up more of our webinars and our educational materials, And if there are any questions, we are just an email away.
Read about another woman powerhouse, this time in the professional football arena (yes, really!)
More than 100 University of Chicago alumni are demanding the school’s endowment divest itself of fossil-fuel interests and say they will refuse to donate to the university until all fossil-fuel allocations are eliminated.
The alumni movement is spearheaded by UChicago for Climate Action, a group founded in 2023 by UC alumni who want the university to advance a livable future, and parallels an on-campus student-led effort, UChicago Divest, which has collected over 2,500 signatures from the university community.
A letter sent to the university by the alumni notes that UC is behind other leading universities in fossil-fuel divestment. If UC agrees with this alumni call, the university would join a number of leading institutions like Oxford and Cambridge which are working to divest from fossil fuels, the letter points out.
“If the University of Chicago wants to truly be a peer of Ivy League institutions, the board should approve this change and join the majority of Ivys like Brown, Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Princeton in working to divest from or substantially reduce investment in fossil fuels,” said Katharine Bierce, one of the co-founders of UChicago for Climate Action.
The group argues the university’s investments in fossil fuel are at odds with its sustainability plan, established in 2022. While universities like Notre Dame, Ball State and Princeton have committed to a net zero campus using solutions like electric heat pumps, thermal storage and geo-exchange technology, the University of Chicago still plans to rely on fossil fuels on campus via gas-fired central steam plant central heating, the group said in a press release.
“While the University was built from John Rockefeller’s oil money, it can choose – like many Rockefeller descendants today – not to use its wealth and prestige to prop up an industry that threatens life on this planet,” said Michael Hendrix, another of the co-founders of UChicago for Climate Action.
“Over a decade ago, my first campus job was calling alumni to fundraise. Many alumni today aren’t comfortable giving money to a university that invests its endowment in fossil-fuel companies.” he said.
In a statement to the Chicago Maroon, the official newspaper of the University of Chicago, the university said divestment was against its policy of abstaining from taking political or social stances, as articulated in its Kalven Report.
“Over more than a century, through a great deal of vigorous debate, the university has developed a consensus against taking social or political stances on issues outside its core mission,” a university spokesperson told the paper. “The university’s longstanding position is that doing this through investments or other means would only diminish the university’s distinctive contribution — providing a home for faculty and students to espouse and challenge the widest range of social practices and beliefs.”
The spokesperson said the UC investment team performs “due diligence to ensure that the funds in which it invests and their managers have no history of illegal behavior and have a strong track record of meeting the professional norms of their business.”
The university also said it would continue its efforts to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
“The university continues to focus on … the goal set in 2020 of a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030, by procuring renewable energy and implementing energy conservation projects,” the spokesperson told the Maroon.
The alumni demand is the latest development putting pressure on the University of Chicago. A student legal complaint in October of 2023 against the university filed with the Office of the Illinois Attorney General argues that the university’s fossil-fuel investments violate its responsibilities as a nonprofit institution.
Six months prior to the complaint filing, in April of 2023, over 200 people rallied on campus on the main quadrangle to call for divestment. Over 50 professors and 60 local and national organizations have joined the coalition of students to affirm that these investments contribute to the climate crisis and cause harm to UC’s students and community.
Nationally, nearly 100 educational institutions have committed to some form of fossil-fuel divestment, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Georgetown, Cornell, Syracuse, and the University of Michigan, according to the Global Fossil Fuel Divestment Commitments database.
The Sustainable Finance Podcast is a weekly program featuring conversations with sustainability thought leaders such as cleantech entrepreneurs, VC investors, CEOs, NGO executives, and creators of the ESG indices and analytics platforms.
Tee Ganbold is co-founder and CEO at Improvability AI, the generative AI improvement engine for sustainability, which is making sustainability cost effective for everyone. In my interview I ask Tee to walk us through how businesses can enhance their sustainability focus and increase profits through intuitive AI agents and applications that automate tasks and workflows to lower costs in the business model and supply chains.
Paul Ellis: Hello Tee and welcome to the Sustainable Finance Podcast. You’ve been at a summit in London, right? Please tell us about it.
Tee Ganbold: Yes. And thank you for having me. Last week I attended the Sustainable Markets Initiative gathering for CEOs. It was the Spring Summit and we gathered about 200 leaders, from the CEO of Bank of America to CEOs of funds to CEOs of private institutions that are the corporates that private equity firms own. So it was a mix and there were a few select technology companies which I’m delighted to have been representing. This initiative was launched by His Majesty King Charles III in 2020 as the ‘go-to’ global private sector organization on sustainable transition. This Spring Summit continued this work.
PE: You met a lot of new people, I’m sure, and made a lot of connections for your firm. That’s a wonderful opportunity. I want to start by making a statement but also turn it into a question for you. It’s my experience that good business decision makers use some method of decision intelligence to determine their needs in any given situation. How can generative AI support and improve that process for sustainability?
Tee Ganbold
TG: That’s such a great question, Paul, and I will allude to what I’ve been discussing with other CEOs in the last week. Let’s take the scenario of the Sustainable Markets Initiative. There are 200 CEOs operating billion-dollar businesses or investing in billion-dollar companies, and there is a level of understanding and consensus that sustainable markets need to happen. But to actually decide how is very challenging.
There’s a lot of debate. For example, in the real estate task force, there was debate over whether hydrogen or biofuel should be used. That debate requires the energy task force to tune in and provide perspective. This is a very human collaborative process, but the truth of the matter is we would have better decision making if we had this cross pollination of information from both task forces and the latest research being surfaced to decision makers using generative AI.
Imagine your experience of ChatGPT. You might ask ChatGPT for marketing help. You might write about marketing as a consumer, but in the business world or the finance world, it needs to be very accurate and it needs to come from sources that you can trust.
So, from a small community of researchers that you trust, you want that decision intelligence to surface and help you to make decisions. For example, in the real estate scenario you want the latest research on fuels so that you can go into a meeting and inform other stakeholders. At the moment, business leaders are going into meetings with incomplete information because we are making decisions on a few different data points. But we don’t have the latest research at hand from the energy sector, for example, because information is so disparate right now.
Knowledge is fragmented and the Internet is a bit like an ocean. We need generative AI that is based on collective intelligence from scientists, from researchers and the top leaders in industry who say this is verified, truthful information and let’s work off that. That’s when decision making is going to be much better for us all.
PE: I completely agree with you. And, of course, one of the big issues is that many leaders, as well as the people who are sourcing the data within their companies, are very hesitant to share that information across a broad swath of even their own sectors of the economy for competitive reasons. Was that part of the dialogue at the conference?
TG: That is an assumption, I believe, that is out there. But if you are working towards a collective goal, and everyone at the Sustainable Markets Initiative had a collective goal, they would like to invest in companies that are addressing sustainability, that are considering regulations and making sure it’s part of their business model, and are already making sure that they’re accounting for it. Within that collective, it is reasonable to suggest that they want to share the latest research.
If you’re not part of that collective, it is fair to say you don’t want to share information and that is totally fine. But this collective wants to progress, wants to invest in companies that are already accounting for such risk and that sort of collective will share information. We cannot expect everyone on the planet to do this. I don’t think that’s realistic.
It’s a little bit like OPEC. OPEC shares information based on OPEC’s interest. OPEC is very powerful because OPEC member states share information so that their interest in keeping oil prices high is served and any bit of intelligence that can serve OPEC’s interest will be shared.
In the Sustainable Markets Initiative’s case, any intelligence that can help further the goals of the Sustainable Markets Initiative can be shared and will be shared. And anything that is proprietary data is a different matter. For example, sharing customer data, sharing supplier data, if you think there’s something wrong with that supplier, you don’t want to share. But you might want intelligence on a supplier that is doing very positive things because it could save everyone in the collective time to do due diligence and do the repetitive work. And finally, competitive information should always be within the bounds of an organization.
But there is certain knowledge that a community needs, for example, to finance those who are lending to you, those who are insuring you, those who are making and creating regulations.
There is collective intelligence that needs to be shared and it is shared and that is the current reality. It is shared right now, but it needs to be shared better and it needs to be less fragmented. It needs to be clearer for everyone to utilize and that’s what generative AI is very, very useful for.
PE: Now I’m going to ask you to explain what a proactive AI agent does and how it supports decision intelligence.
TG: In the AI space, an AI agent is an emerging field. The reason is that in the past, AI has been used for predictive analytics on a few pieces of information about forecasting or better decision making with a few sets of data.
Where AI is going is that it is going to be much more proactive. I’ll give you an example. Meta
META
, formerly known as Facebook, has an AI agent connecting to their 1% responsible supplier goal. If you are at Meta and you’re the chief sustainability officer, you’ve created this goal for the different stakeholders, for your investors, for regulators, for your own teams. And it says we are going to have 1% responsible suppliers, so you’ve committed to that in your sustainability report.
What an AI agent does is connect your report that you’ve now communicated to the world to an internal database of procurement information and invoice information so that when teams are about to renew their contract three months in advance, they will be notified, and the AI agent would speak to them and say, you’re about to renew in three months. Have you considered these 10 suppliers for, let’s say, non-discretionary spending like pencils. We found 10 alternative suppliers you can interview. Can you have a look at these because in three months’ time you’re going to have to renew your contract with somebody because Meta needs pencils, because engineers like to draw, yeah, they do like to draw, they like pen and paper and pencils. These are responsible suppliers because they’ve recycled a particular source and here are 10.
Improvability AI via Facebook
So that’s what an AI agent is. It connects a very large, strategic goal set out in a report with a very specific set of data such as procurement information. Meta has probably got billions of suppliers around the world trying to sell to them. So again, a lot of data there and they’ve also got invoice data. They know when the contracts are up.
That’s what an AI agent does. It connects these dots, which really is the role of a sustainable procurement officer or someone in the procurement team having to make these decisions. But it could be much more intelligent. It really engages different teams who know nothing about sustainability, but they probably care because a lot of people in Silicon Valley care about where their pencils come from. So it does this amazing thing of allowing Meta to deliver on a wider goal, but also it allows the people within Meta to feel that the company is actually caring and being proactive.
PE: I think you’ve partially answered our next question, but I’ll start from the beginning of it anyway. When C-suite and board level leaders of a company take the initial step of deciding what sustainability data to measure, for example in this case, where do we get our pencils, the tracking is often done by data vendors that rarely produce industry competitive or AI sustainability outperformance. How does Improvability AI support the performance, the how and the why of measurement for sustainability data and for competitive outperformance results by the firm?
TG: So that question really leads me to what is happening in the market right now.
In the current market, for anyone watching out there, most large financial services or corporates have to make do with one large company that does supply chain due diligence. It is fantastic and has done a fantastic job for the last 10 years. It’s a French company that helps companies do supply chain due diligence and gives ratings. The issue with it and the business model is that it is so restrictive.
For example, you’re Meta and you ask all your suppliers to do supply chain due diligence. Currently, if your supplier employs under 25 people you have to pay $900. That’s a lot. And it, of course, scales and costs more with more people. So, what we’ve done to address that problem, to gather more information on responsible and sustainable suppliers, is to make it free—make this entire process free. And we’ve got very large companies saying we really want to make this free until verification.
Verification is very important. When companies give their data on what they’re actually doing, let’s say going back to pencils: I’m a pencil supplier and I am using X material. My people are treated well and we are following the rules. Verification of that data is when you provide evidence that you’re actually doing what you say you are.
So whether it’s certificates or evidence of a particular material or you’re paying your taxes, that is verification. But the initial part, it should be free for you to ask a company if they’re sustainable or not. It should be free until you want to double check. So that’s the problem right now.
Another problem we address is that a lot of companies have a lot of research and a lot of data within their own four walls. And a lot of the time it’s fantastic knowledge. There’s a presumption that we have to go on the internet for certain information.
But, if you’re a industry leader or if you’re a company, the types that we’re speaking with or the category we’re talking with is $100 million plus turnover. These are the companies that are being regulated in California or in Europe. These companies have done a lot of research on what is a sustainable supplier to them and what is not. All they need to do is to bring that data. And this is where generative AI is very helpful to resurface information within one’s own database.
Let’s say all your supplier data is in one place in a company. And I’ll give you a scenario, a university in America that is trying to attract the top Gen Z from around the world because that’s how they get their revenue and their ranking. They have signed a pledge to be part of the Coolfood initiative.
World Resources Institute photo
So C-O-O-L. It means providing their students with sustainable food. How do they do this and what is the process? They have to understand all their suppliers and what they’re doing. And they have to understand, let’s say tomato. We all like tomato in our sandwiches and our salads. So, they would need to understand all their suppliers of tomatoes and they would need to understand who is sustainable and who is not. That intelligence could be: at least they have an idea of who their suppliers are right now.
They could surface all that data of all their tomato suppliers, that’s number one. They need to do that. Number two, they might need to do due diligence on all their suppliers. So that’s when number one comes in, the sustainability due diligence process. But fundamentally, a lot of knowledge is already sitting within an organization’s database, and there are a lot of notes, there’s a lot of history already there.
People can already start automating report writing on the platform. That’s an area where we think companies really need help lowering their costs. You can go on the platform, you can start automating internal CEO memos, and we’re now going to start automating CSRD reports, which is a massive cost to organizations.
PE: Yes, the regulatory infrastructure starting in Europe because that’s where everything begins, it seems. So that’s a good example of a place to start. How can universities or companies get started on the path to making sustainability competitive and profitable with AI if they’re not already doing that?
TG: Our key goal is to help companies to become sustainable at an affordable and accessible cost, because if it is very costly, no one is going to become sustainable. And that’s how a company can focus on their profitability. Becoming sustainable should not be a huge cost center. What we’ve done is lower the access to entry to become a sustainable company. The pricing of the existing incumbents is ludicrous. I’ll compare it to Adobe. Before Canva came about, Adobe was so expensive you only had a few companies with nice design. I don’t know if you use Canva, Paul?
PE: I have, yes.
TG: Remember when it was only Adobe? It was like $7,500, so only a few companies could afford a designer who even knew how to use Adobe to design marketing materials. So only a few companies looked presentable. Everyone else had terrible marketing. This is where Canva came about, so that businesses could have good design. Canva has democratised access to good design.
What we’re doing is seeing the incumbents as Adobe. They are making it so expensive to become sustainable that the price needs to go down. So we are making it affordable and accessible for businesses to become sustainable.
It should be normal to be a sustainable business. It should be and it will with our mission: that businesses can focus on profit because that’s why they are there, to generate returns for the different stakeholders, whether it is their investors, their customers, their employees. We want them to go back to doing what they’re very good at by lowering the cost to becoming sustainable.
PE: That’s a fantastic mission! And we want to know where people can go to learn more about Improvability, AI and how they can get in touch with you.
TG: Thank you so much, Paul. Anyone can go to our website to learn more. They can also go to start querying information on public companies. Of course, you can only ask questions about public companies. But if they want to test it on their own companies, then they can access it.
I love for companies to get in touch about their pains, what they’re struggling with, how we can help them with lower cost, more accessible tools for them to become sustainable. Most organizations do want to get better because their customers are asking for it. If you need help, please get in touch. Our team will be delighted to help and really be the painkiller in this.
Changing consumer behavior has called upon corporations to put environmental, social and governance issues at the forefront of their business strategies. However, more importantly, internal diversity efforts have helped improve the process in which employees perceive a company’s ESG-focused strategies, furthering the conversation surrounding the importance of developing and implementing more progressive corporate social responsibility planning.
In an attempt to sway public opinion, and address internal concerns, organizations are building more robust CSR frameworks, leveraging ESG-focused initiatives, partially supported by external frameworks and industry standardization practices. To further bolster these efforts, and to address critical climate and environmental issues more effectively, organizations are now starting to look outside of their internal structures to deliver more purpose-driven solutions to environmental and social issues.
EarthDay.org image
Since April 1970, Earth Day has become an internationally recognized event that is now celebrated by countries across the globe. Earth Day aims to address issues relating to the environment and how individual and organizational efforts can bolster environmental consciousness.
During the first several years, Earth Day drew support from more than 20 million American protestors aiming to raise awareness against the rapid deterioration of critical natural resources and the importance of establishing environmental laws, regulations and compliance practices.
Over the decades, Earth Day became more widely supported, having amassed more than 200 million supporters by the late 1990s and nearly a billion by 2000. Earth Day celebrates all the progress we’ve made since the year of its founding, however the conversation has now shifted to incorporate more progressive environmental policies that can help to combat climate change, mitigate impact driven by industrial activities and hold individual stakeholders accountable for their actions.
Today, the larger purpose of Earth Day is to continuously promote the justification for environmental laws, and build towards initiatives that can help protect endangered ecosystems and safeguard earth’s natural resources for future generations by helping to inspire more actionable efforts to build a cleaner and sustainable environment.
The link between Earth Day and corporate environmental strategies
Rapidly deteriorating environmental conditions, alongside the depletion of natural resources and the impact of industrial activities, have put pressure on corporations to develop and implement more progressive environmental strategies.
The focus here is not only on the internal justification of developing more sustainable solutions but rather on how organizational impact can drive change and better benefit communities.
For clarification, corporate social responsibility is centered on building corporate strategies that focus on the broader view of companies’ or organizations’ environmental responsibility and the actionable steps they take to make sustainable improvements and enhance self-regulation and environmental accountability.
On the other hand, environmental, social, and governance brings into question various metrics that can help stakeholders, including government entities, investors, employees and customers evaluate a company’s sustainability efforts. ESG places a strong emphasis on delivering reports using available data and is often administered by external bodies and regulators.
In this case, we’ll be focusing on how Earth Day can help inspire CSR activities more effectively, ensuring the company’s commitment to serving purposeful environmental strategies that can benefit employees, investors, customers, and most importantly, the environment and surrounding communities.
Corporate social responsibility in practice
For organizational leaders, CSR in practice can mean the following:
Corporate strategies are developed in accordance with efforts to benefit communities and the societies they exist within.
CSR deliverables are goal-oriented and can vary across organizations, departments and teams; however, these activities support the broader view and align with the company’s commitments and overall mission.
Incorporation of accountability and self-regulation are critical elements within internal communication processes.
Delivery of performance metrics is shared, communicated and discussed between management, investors and employees.
Implementation of CSR initiatives serves as a benchmark for mitigating environmental and social harm.
CSR is used in part as an indicator of company culture that aims to promote satisfactory employee conditions and improve overall performance.
As more organizations begin to recognize the importance of incorporating CSR activities into their corporate practices, they are also finding the efforts lead to several beneficial advantages against market competitors:
Improves employee retention and engagement: The importance of having a palatable CSR mission may influence a company’s ability to hire, retain and onboard employees. In one study, researchers found that corporate social responsibility and internal and external CSR activities can improve employee satisfaction.
Improves cross-functional employee relationships:Similarly, having a strong understanding of CSR mission values may help develop more cross-functional employee relationships. This is seen in the same study, whereby researchers have found that implementation of CSR has a significant relationship with brand equity and brand reputation.
Boosts organizational performance:Social responsibility has become a way of measuring organizational financial success. One recent study has found mounting evidence that social responsibility, measured by ESG performance indicators, can have a direct positive effect on a company’s financial performance.
Builds more optimized community relationships:Undertaking environmental and social challenges can further improve the community an organization may find itself in. By having more explicit CSR metrics, corporations have the ability to maximize relationships with community leaders, and further drive a more positive impact.
Promotes corporate environmental citizenship:Companies that are confronted with environmental, economic and social constraints may often have more dynamic business models and align their strategies more effectively. Findings from a research paper indicate that having environmental strategies can have a long-term impact on a company’s performance.
Protects long-term shareholder value:Improvements in corporate social responsibility do not only impact company reputation and employee satisfaction but can help to safeguard long-term shareholder value and mitigate potential financial risks.
Provides access to new capital markets:Companies that develop CSR strategies with a focus on environmental importance can leverage new market opportunities through the support of local environmental policies.
Allows for more frequent collaboration:Companies can be encouraged to customize their CSR strategies to further their collaboration efforts with local communities, nonprofit organizations, non-governmental organizations and external stakeholders.
Promotes more effective environmental practices:Improving internal CSR strategies can impact external activities, which in turn could lead to organizations bringing about more effective change leadership.
Improves research and development: Investing in the proper CSR and ESG strategies would mean that companies are furthering the improvement of research and development for more environmentally friendly practices. With this, there can be more functional change taking place across various parts of the value chain such as sourcing, supply and demand, and customer delivery.
The importance of Earth Day: today, tomorrow, forever
Change takes time, and we’ve seen this with many things before. However, conditions are becoming increasingly challenging and corporations have been called upon to take the lead and provide a more sophisticated and dynamic solution to our current environmental problems.
Through promoting more robust and progressive corporate social responsibility strategies and aligning these efforts with environmental, social, and governance efforts, organizations can empower their internal structures more effectively and deliver more actionable results within the communities they serve.
Our environmental issues are a complex, yet shared experience we are all responsible for. However, change is not possible without the proper guidance and leadership. By stepping up and seeing how things can be different and how corporate environmental strategies can be impacted by those things around us.
We, alongside our communities and leaders, can find more actionable solutions that encourage sustainability and promote ethical and environmental citizenship across all business sectors.
