Guide to Sustainable Investing

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We here at the YK Center have composed a list of useful links that can aid you in creating a sustainable investment portfolio.

Fossil Free Funds
Fossil Free Funds is a search platform that enables people to find out if their money, in the form of individual investments or an employer-provided 401(k), is being used to extract and consume fossil fuels. Owning investments in coal companies, oil/gas producers, and fossil-fired utilities isn’t just a moral question. Fossil fuel investments carry real financial risks. When emissions are constrained, fossil fuel companies will have their carbon assets stranded. The implication is that they’re massively overvalued, and markets are realizing that investing in fossil fuels is a risky bet.

The Top 200 Sustainable Mutual Funds  
Barron’s selected the 200 U.S. large-company, actively managed funds with the most sustainable portfolios, and ranked them by one-year returns. A full quarter of the list—the top 50—beat the Standard & Poor’s 500 index’s 15.4% return in the year ended Sept. 30. Green denotes funds with a sustainable mandate—ESG-focused, socially responsible, or religious. The others come by their sustainable portfolios via their stock-picking process. The ranking was based on data provided by independent research firms Morningstar and Sustainalytics.

The Best Banks for Green Bonds
The latest league tables reveal which bookrunners dominate the burgeoning green bond market. Going forward, China’s lenders are the ones to watch.

The World’s Most Sustainable Companies 2017
Since 2005, Toronto-based magazine and research firm Corporate Knights has put together the Global 100, an annual list of the world’s most sustainable companies. Using publicly available data, Corporate Knights rates large firms on 14 key measures, evaluating their management of resources, finances and employees. For the ranking, Corporate Knights considers about 4,000 companies with market values of at least $2 billion. It’s an intensive research undertaking, taking about 1,000 hours each year to produce.

The Clean 200
The Clean 200 is not intended to be a stock-pick-list or an index. It suggests that there are ways to identify the companies that are paving the way to the “Great Transition” to a clean energy economy. It is an invitation to open a broad and transparent global conversation. We hope that the best minds will find this thought exercise as exciting as we do and join us. Launches on February 21, 2017.