Covid-19 stimulus is climate’s ‘Last Chance Saloon’

We are on a precipice in our fight to make the world economy more environmentally friendly. Over recent years we have seen a massive focus from Governments all over the world to address environmental issues. 

Coronavirus will present Governments with a stark challenge, many people will be arguing that we need to save businesses at any and all costs and this means removing the regulatory costs that environmental regulation might have created. 

Our view is that this crisis can be used to accelerate the transition to a more environmentally friendly economy. We would like to see stimulus funds being used to accelerate that transition using Government money to fund jobs and project to help the private sector transition at a faster rate. We would also like to see the Government use a sustainability lens to decide which businesses to support, in a similar way to how we choose the businesses that we invest your KiwiSaver dollars in. The Government will need to make tough decisions on what businesses to support and let die over the next few months, we hope they take a long term view to the sustainability of the businesses that they want to support.

Unfortunately, we have already seen the US rolling back a number of environmental regulations under the guise of supporting the business through the crisis, let’s hope the New Zealand Government does not follow suit.

Our founder, Rupert Carlyon had an interesting chat with Marc Dalder from Newsroom on this topic. 

Read the full article here

The Kōura difference

Kōura adopts a sustainable lens to choosing all of its investments. We avoid a number of industries in their entirety (Alcohol, Gambling, Weapons, Adult Entertainment, Tobacco and Whaling) and then for the remainder we use tools to assess how companies perform against a wide variety of sustainability criteria, these criteria are used to give all companies a score of A-F.  We will only ever invest in companies that score A-C against these criteria.

This means you can be confident your KiwiSaver money is only invested in companies that you would be proud to talk about.

[hubspot type=cta portal=5033855 id=5fd62b16-34cc-46bf-9a9d-890ea0cae321]