DAILY MAVERICK WEBINAR: Covid-19 has presented a reset button – use it

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Will the Covid-19 crisis change the way we invest and the types of investments we make? Can societies afford to transition to sustainable and responsible investing? And, more ominously, can they afford not to? In a recent Daily Maverick webinar, these issues were vigorously debated.

In 2020, the world came skidding to a halt, stopped by the Covid-19 pandemic which spread across the globe in 120 days, ignoring borders and impervious to race, class or creed.

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. “We have been on an endless treadmill of maximum return,” she says, “but there are no returns from a dead planet populated with troubled societies.”

In addition, a group of 300 mutual funds that integrate ESG factors into their investment decisions attracted $21.4-billion in new money in 2019, compared with $5.4-billion a year earlier, according to data from Morningstar Inc.”assets by roughly $22-billion. This offered hope that life, post-Covid-19, will not return to the way it was.

Yet South Africa’s policies still promote nuclear energy and clean coals ahead of greener alternatives. National Treasury has published a draft paper for comment on “Financing a Sustainable Economy”, as a framework for financial institutions to better disclose public information on their green practices and investments.

While the Covid-19 crisis poses an existential challenge for many businesses, it does not have to hinder efforts to pursue a future path of sustainable growth. Though “there’ll always be winners and losers” in transitioning to a greener economy, “there could be a focus on people who are dependent on the fossil-fuel industry”, continued Martens. “How do we retrain them? How do we redeploy them? Lots of private sector companies are doing research on this, on how they can pivot and still keep their workers.

 

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