Our Common Humanity in the Information Age. Principles and Values for Development

SUSTAINABLE FINANCE
Julie Fox Gorte, Vice-President, Calvert Group
I am from the finance sector, which is one of the sectors that most people associate the 
least with sustainability but we do have what we call “sustainable finance” or “socially 
responsible investment”. Finance is probably one of the few sectors where most of the 
people practicing, believe that they are masters of the universe, are either smarter or 
better and certainly richer than other people. This is a sort of Darwinian concept that 
seems to have conquered most of the financial markets. We need to remember that we 
have not conquered nature and we never will.

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60 | Our Common Humanity in the Information Age 
Investors have a tendency to create their own world. If every investor believes that 
environmental management on the part of the corporation in which they invest is not 
important, as far as the stock prices are concerned, then it is not. But if they all believe 
that environmental management is important and look for companies with good 
environmental management and pay a premium for them, than the stock price will 
respond and therefore it becomes important. So we really create the world that we live in 
by our actions and by our beliefs.
Most investors believe that the sustainability is important. However they feel that it has a 
long-term time frame that it just does not matter to the trading and purchasing now. Wall 
Street in particular has a very short attention span. Most of the value of any corporation is 
really what it is capable of providing in perpetuity rather than in the next quarter, which 
is the most common time frame in most of the financial markets.
2005, on the other hand, may have been a major turning point in this attitude. We have 
seen a gradual rise in the number of investors that are interested in sustainability issues 
because of the fact that there were devastating hurricane seasons in 2004 and 2005. It is 
likely that the severity of hurricanes has increased because of the warming of the oceans. 
One degree is a lot when you think of the size of the oceans.
Today you find more people who are interested in climate change than you would had 
found just a year ago. Climate change is the most important problem that earth faces and 
this is the first time than one species on earth has been able to knowingly affect the 
ecology of the entire globe.
If we continue to change the climate at the rate at which we are doing it now, the only 
precedent we have in history at this rate of change was at the end of the Cretaceous Era, 
when everything that weigh more 77 pounds on the earth died. That is not a good 
precedent to set, so we are very interested in bringing sustainability issues into finance. 
How are we doing this? We have several partnerships with many organizations, but we 
have at least three with the UN.
The UN has led in this area and will continue to lead with the launch this year, actually 
down at the New York Stock Exchange, of the UN Principles for Responsible 
Investment. There is a website you can go to see this: www.unpri.org. And there are 
signatories for this on every continent, in Africa, Asia, North America, South America 
and Europe – investors plan sponsors including Calvert and of the largest pension plans 
have signed up to pay attention to the principles of sustainability in our investments.

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Chapter III – Respect for Nature and Sustainable Development | 61 
We have a partnership and been a member of the UNEP (United Nations Environment 
Programme) Finance Initiatives, which has been partly re sponsible for the launch of the 
PRI and has also done a great deal of work on what we call the materiality or the 
importance in the financial context of environmental, social and governance related 
issues.