Field Guide to Investing in a Regenerative Economy: Grasslands
 

"Greenwich, CT, is a long way from the wind-swept prairies where ranchers Jim Howell, Zachary Jones and Tony Malmberg make their homes. But it is perhaps an early indication of how the capital markets' terrain is shifting that the three found themselves in the heart of hedge fund country recently, updating their investment partners in a custom grazing business who were as interested in rural job creation, carbon sequestration and soil enrichment as they were in how increased stocking rates and fatter cattle would enrich them financially." --From "The Grasslands Story"

Capital Institute contributed to a new Ebook, just published by Harvard University Business School.  The Landscape of Integrated Reporting is a collection of articles and thought pieces by those who attended a recent Integrated Reporting Workshop organized by Professor Robert Eccles, co-author of One Report.  Our contribution is a letter written by a fictional CEO to her board of directors.  Read it below and access the Ebook in its entirety here.

If you open up the papers lately, you’ll find the discussion of the sovereign debt crisis tends to focus narrowly on offending nations’ profligate spending and borrowing habits. While these behaviors have no doubt contributed to fiscal deficits, what is often overlooked is that addressing another kind of deficit--an ecological one--is of equal importance if nations are to sustain healthy and resilient economies. One bank is working to advance this notion by incorporating into its sustainability rating of sovereign debt  a country's resource efficiency.  

Bank Sarasin, a Swiss private bank founded in 1841, launched the first investment fund based on the concept of eco-efficiency in 1994 and has been including social factors in its sustainability ratings since 1997. Sarasin’s sustainability rating of sovereign debt assesses a country’s creditworthiness based not only on resource availability but also on resource efficiency. Viewing a country’s ability to repay its debt over the long-term through this holistic prism yields some noteworthy results: resource-rich but inefficient economies such as the United States and Russia appear particularly vulnerable to future rating downgrades while resource-scarce but efficient countries like Japan, the Netherlands, and Germany appear much less at risk.