20 years of sustainable investing and what this tells us about the future - Flipbook - Page 8
Sustainable themes and companies over
20 years
From the development of personalised medicine to the transition to lower carbon fossil
fuels, we are fascinated by the wide-ranging trends that are changing the world and the
opportunities they create. Why is this relevant to investors?
Many of these outcomes have been delivered by the creativity of
businesses generating strong profit growth and investment returns. It
is these innovative companies in which our SF Funds have invested
for two decades, and we feel most investors underestimate the
speed, scale and persistency of such trends.
We look at the world through the prism of three mega trends – Better
resource efficiency (cleaner), Improved health (healthier) and Greater
safety and resilience (safer) – and 21 themes within these.
Cleaner: Using our resources more efficiently (water, increasing
recycling of waste, lower carbon energy sources and energy
efficiency)
Healthier: Improving our quality of life through
better education, healthier lifestyles and diet or
better healthcare
Safer: Making the systems we rely on safer or more
resilient. This includes car safety, keeping
our online data safe with cyber-security
and spreading risk through appropriate
insurance mechanisms
2008
UK Climate
Change Act
passed into law, the first of
its kind.
8 - Liontrust: 20 Years of Sustainable Investing
Key to our investment approach is looking ahead, often years into
the future, and making decisions based on how we believe things
will develop. We focus on the biggest issues of our time, hunt for
companies that can make money from solving them and invest in
the opportunities of maximum impact for maximum returns – and this
means getting ahead of the curve by identifying major transition points
across sectors is vital. We have seen this in fashion, where companies
around the world have had to address serious deficiencies in labour
standards, and autos, which continues to be transformed.