What Is SRI?

“We really need to incorporate the analysis of these factors into our investment thinking,” he continues. “That’s been a way to expand the tent around responsible investing. If responsible investing is defined as we’re going to screen out all military contractors, it becomes a nonstarter for these large universal investors, who are kind of invested in everything. They’re coming up with strategies that tend not to be screening strategies, but themed investing. So they’ll invest in clean technology funds or sustainability funds or being more active investors and going out to their investment managers or going out to the companies and saying, “these are the practices we want to see you incorporate across our entire portfolio.”

Among the positive signs that Seitchik points to in the SRI movement is some of what’s being done by the Investor Network on Climate Risk. “I think that’s the most successful network in terms of expanding the tent of people interested in incorporating environment, social and governance factors, into their investment program, it’s not being defined as socially responsible investing, but it has a lot of commonality with traditional socially responsible investing. So nomenclature is kind of difficult. We’re a member of INCR, but I don’t think that the North Carolina pension plan that is a member of INCR would say that we’re necessarily social investors, but they are signing up to a set of activities through INCR which are really intending to reduce climate risk systemically, which is going to help their portfolios in the long run. I think that’s a real trend, to think about environmental, social and governance factors as risk and opportunity factors.”