Global Impact Investing Network launches Sustainable Development Goals campaign

The Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), the not-for-profit industry body, has launched a Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) campaign calling on the financial world to take a larger role in impact investing with the goal of aiding the SDGs.

It comes after a coalition of Dutch and Swedish pension fund managers have pledged to use the SDGs as a framework through which to make investor decisions, citing the need to meet “mounting social and environmental challenges”.

The group includes Swedish buffer funds AP1, AP2, AP3 and AP4 and Dutch asset managers APG and PGGM.

PGGM is also involved in GIIN’s new Sustainable Development Goals campaign though an accompanying report on how investors are trying to support the SDGs through impact investment.

PGGM is profiled in the report, alongside Swiss-based sustainable asset manager RobecoSAM and Dutch-based fund manager Triodos Investment Management.

The SDGs were adopted at the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit in September last year. The SDGs are a set of 17 targets to end poverty, fight inequality and injustice, and tackle climate change by 2030.Introducing the campaign, launched to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the publication of the SDGs, Amit Bouri, CEO of GIIN, said: “We support the United Nations in recognizing the critical role of the private sector in advancing the Sustainable Development Goals,” he said. “If sufficient investment capital can be channelled to these goal areas through impact investing, the SDGs are achievable. We need more of the world’s investors to join in this world-changing initiative if we’re going to make the SDGs a reality. There’s no time to waste.”

On the launch of the new SDGs, an update to 2000’s Millennium Development Goals, the UN agreed that while aid will be vital to reaching the SDGs, new and innovative financing mechanisms from the public and private sector would also be critical.

It has led to much attention on devising ways to make parts of the SDGs investible.

Last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation created a new role to reflect the SDGs, hiring Nick O’Donohoe, former chief executive of Big Society Capital and Head of Research at J.P. Morgan, to work as a Senior Advisor on Blended Finance.

And recently, veteran investor George Soros called on investors to play their part in achieving the SDGs in a report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) looking at the SDGs as business opportunities.