Alexander Otto: Balancing Social, Environmental, and Financial Concerns.
It is without a doubt that sustainability has moved up the business agenda in the last 12 months.
Despite the unremittingly gloomy economic landscape, the question of how today’s leaders balance social and environmental concerns with financial ones—what is known as “impact investing”—was a key debate at Davos this year, and it took center stage during His Highness the Aga Khan’s speech at the ULI Europe leadership dinner in Paris in February.
Sustainability and the property industry have not always been easy companions. The Aga Khan’s speech reflected on real estate’s notable absence from the field of impact investing to date—an industry that is estimated to be worth $1 trillion over the next decade. But as a long-term game by nature, sustainability was a business issue that has historically found it tough to compete; during the mid-2000s it lost out to strategies that reaped quicker, more tangible rewards for the bottom line, and during the early days of the downturn it faced a different kind of competition as investors focused cash on priority areas.
via Alexander Otto: Balancing Social, Environmental, and Financial Concerns.
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