The Puzzle of Sustainable Investment

Book excerpt: An in-depth, engaging, and comprehensive approach to sustainable investing In The Puzzle of Sustainable Investment: What Smart Investors Should Know, veteran Environmental-Social-Governance (ESG) investor and educator Lukasz Pomorski delivers a balanced, informed, and insightful new take on sustainable investing. The author takes you through every relevant aspect of the frameworks, design choices, and data that sustainable investors use to build successful portfolios, as well as how sustainability choices might affect a financial portfolio, including cases where sustainability objectives are at odds with financial returns. You'll also learn how sustainable investing and the financial portfolios it leads to may affect the broader economy. The book addresses many of the misconceptions and misperceptions coloring the debate around sustainable investing and driving the divergence of views about how sustainability affects investment returns and real-world outcomes. You'll also discover: A varied toolkit you can use to operate effectively in the ESG investment arena Strategies for deploying smart economic intuition to assess the—often inaccurate—claims of portfolio managers, commentators, and data providers Ways to balance the risk and return profile of your portfolio while simultaneously increasing its sustainability ratings A must-read book for aspiring and practicing sustainable investment professionals, The Puzzle of Sustainable Investment will also prove invaluable to regulators, policymakers, corporate sustainability specialists, and anyone with an interest in business, finance, economics, or sustainability.