Technology is Pivotal to Today's Sustainable Investing

Technology is pivotal to today’s sustainable investing  

For years economists and scientists have been telling us of the impending doom of diminishing global resources and the ensuing catastrophic impact on business. Without doubt, this scarcity has meant we have had no choice but to find more sustainable ways of doing business. In contrast, digital resources have exploded - created by the abundance of information generated in our online age. This has led to a new approach in technology investing, one which addresses the impact of shrinking resources and that creates the means to manage the profusion of new digital resources. By actively managing both, we create better and more sustainable businesses. This is what we call resource efficiency.

New efficiencies improve resource consumption

So as investors today, we should be looking for ‘efficiencies’ at the core of every investment – efficiencies in ‘old’ resources such as energy, water or materials and efficiencies in ‘new’ ones, such as data, computing power, networks. Efficiency is not only about ‘doing more with less’; it is about using technology to uncover improvements in resource consumption. Take Google as an example.  According to the company, its data centre servers are now able to generate three and a half times the computing power at the same cost and with less electricity than they did five years ago. Information technology is THE critical enabler for efficiency gains and is the next generation approach to cleantech investing.  As far back as 2010, Accenture wrote a report on the cloud’s unprecedented efficiencies and subsequent environmental impact. Today investors are beginning to recognise that resource efficiency makes not only good sustainable sense but also good business sense. In fact, when you stop to consider this further, it is clear that there are whole swathes of the technology industry that have resource savings and improved efficiencies at their core. Document storage, payment services, security, online education and the sharing economy all have elements of resource efficiencies within. There are some big trends emerging from within a raft of different industries – and we believe there are unprecedented opportunities for investors.