Fund Management in the 21st Century: The role of sovereign wealth funds in contributing to a low carbon future.

Role: Co-author

Next steps for investors in transition to low carbon economy

SRI is still a young field with a huge potential for development of more sophisticated approaches, products and indices for the environmentally-conscious investor. While mainstream investors have in excess of 50,000 indices in which to invest, SRI investors have only around 10013 . Several leading fund management companies have started to develop innovative new solutions that not only promote greenhouse gas emissions reductions but also provide new business opportunities. Even so, the severity of the climate change challenge requires even more action from the investment community in the near future. This is where SWFs can step in and take a leadership role to move the investment community in the right direction. Figure 5 below provides a summary of how SWFs can take the next step to ensure a low carbon future by encouraging innovation in sustainability.

Link to the report

GRI Telecommunications Sector Supplement (Paper)

Role: co-author with Sean Gilbert, Michael Kuhndt, Edoardo Gai, Dunstan Hope, Danilo Riva, Chris Tuppen, et.al

Comment
This was the first time "net-positive"/ "climate positive" effects of ICT was included in an international framework I think. Even 15 years later it is ahead of the GHG-protocol, CDP and others that dominate how companies should report (as they stick to only the "reduction" perspective). This is about to change, but as of 2017 the focus is still 99% on the reductions and not how companies can deliver what is needed. 

Summary
GRI is pleased to release the pilot version of the Telecommunications Sector Supplement for use in conjunction with the GRI 2002 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines (‘the Guidelines).

In 2001,GRI launched its supplement programme in response to consistent feedback on the importance of sector-specific guidelines built on the foundation of the Guidelines. GRI supplements capture issues essential to sustainability reporting in a specific sector, but which may not appear in the Guidelines since they are relevant primarily for a specific range of reporting organisations or sectors. By developing both the Guidelines and sectoral supplements, the GRI framework supports the comparison of reporting organisations both across within and across sectors.

Link to paper

WSIS PREP-COM-2 Contribution (Paper)

Role: co-author with Chris Tuppen, et.al

Comment
This was the first attempt at trying to change an international framework and I was surprised to learn how willing policy makers were to acknowledge the potential for ICT to deliver significant contributions (and this was many years before we saw the kind of major impacts that we are used to now). I also explored the gaps between internatinal commettments and national implementation.  

Summary
This contribution puts forward a series of issues that should be reflected in the WSIS summit Declaration and Plan of Action.

Increasing population, economic activity and consumptive lifestyles are placing unsustainable burdens on the earth's natural systems and finite resources. Creating prosperity through much less wasteful and harmful use of resources has been identified as the over-arching sustainable development challenge.

Enhanced connectivity enables people to transact businesses from home, saving commuting time, energy and pollution from transportation. Trends in ICT towards miniaturization of components, and its capacity to monitor resource and energy use through production processes, can greatly reduce environmental and economic costs. Mobile networks are allowing whole phases of 'hard-wired' infrastructure development to be 'leapfrogged' in many parts of the world."1

We suggest that it is essential for the WSIS to consider the Sustainability Implications of the Knowledge Society. In particular we suggest that the environmental dimension has not yet been given sufficient weight alongside the social and economic dimensions.

This proposal is therefore for sustainable development to be explicitly included in the Declaration of Principles and the Plan of Action to be adopted by the World Summit on the Information Society

The key elements of this contribution to WSIS address the following themes:

•  Sustainability Implications of the Knowledge Society (new theme)

• International Cooperation

• Opening the Gates and Overcoming the Digital Divide

• Services and Applications

Link to contribution