The Investment Leaders Group (ILG) has developed an original framework to allow the industry to quantify investment impacts. Our aim is to enable a ‘revolution’ in consumer choice in financial services. This means making the social and environmental impacts of investment transparent to financial consumers in the same way that health and other concerns are apparent to food consumers today.

The Sustainable Investment Framework

All investment has an impact on the real world. To a large extent these impacts – for example job creation or natural resource consumption – are opaque to investors, with limited information available from standard information sources.

The ILG shares a common vision of the future of impact reporting in which all funds will be assessed using a common impact standard such that financial consumers can make informed choices about how and where to invest. This new framework represents an important step in that direction. 

Further development of the framework

The Sustainable Investment Framework outlines six practical ('base') metrics to measure fund impact, published alongside their ideal cousins. These proposed ideal metrics have been designed as a roadmap to assess the absolute performance of funds with reference to United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals.

Following the framework’s publication in 2019, the Investment Leaders Group, convened by the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) has embarked on a programme of work to develop each of the six, ideal metrics from their base versions, leveraging improvements in data infrastructure and availability as regulatory changes and reporting requirements drive better data disclosure. The programme will comprise a series of sequel reports to the Sustainable Investment Framework – one for each impact theme – offered as a guide for funds to judge their performance against these ideal metrics.