By Erin Shackelford

What questions should investors ask about energy investments today? What risks are present in the energy sector as the demand for a greener and more just world grows? A new IRI report authored by David Wood and Vonda Brunsting, Investor Expectations on the Just Transition: Publicly Traded Energy, summarizes research by the IRI, in collaboration with the ICCR, which identifies key concerns and expectations of investors. Drawing on research which culminated in a December, 2019 convening at the Harvard Kennedy School that brought together publicly traded utilities, shareholders, labor representatives, and environmental activists to work towards better understanding of the role investors can play in moving utilities towards a more just and green energy system, this report is a useful brief for investors and publicly traded utilities.

by David Wood

Thanks to Megan Kashner and the Impact and Sustainable Finance Faculty Consortium, I had the chance to write a short piece on the relationship of foundations to impact investing now online at the Stanford Social Innovation Review. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking about for awhile, at least since the formation of the More for Mission Campaign in the mid-2000s – how foundations try to change finance because it’s socially suboptimal, and try to influence investment because it’s socially powerful. It’s one manifestation of what I think of as an essential tension in the field. Practitioners have to hold in their heads two propositions to engage with impact investing: finance can fix things, and we need to fix finance.... Read more about Roles Foundations Play in Shaping Impact Investing