Cultivating a Sustainable Mindset in Finance

Book excerpt: Cultivating a Sustainable Mindset in Finance explores the behavioural challenges and opportunities to cultivate a sustainable mindset amongst financial professionals that could accelerate capital allocation to combat climate change. It draws on real life examples of institutional investors. While many investors recognize the growing need to incorporate climate change into investment decisions, it is not a straightforward task, and there are a multitude of challenges that investors face that slow down the speed and scale of action required to adapt investment processes. Some of these barriers have been widely debated and often cited, such as lack of consistent signals from government policy-makers, the need to upscale new technology advances, a lack of suitable investable opportunities or lack of data, models, or suitable metrics. However, there are additional challenges that relate specifically to investor behaviour itself, that are often overlooked. Through real-life case studies and survey evidence, this book explores the psychological underpinnings of investment decisions, including the dominant mindset of financial professionals, the prevalence of cognitive biases, cultural drivers, and personal relationships (both at the individual level and inside and outside organizations), and sets out a pathway to cultivate a sustainable mindset to accelerate capital allocation with the urgency that is needed to combat climate change. It is of interest to researchers and students in finance and investment; to investment firms; and to any organization looking to make sense of sustainability financing.