What gets measured, gets managed

Low carbon infrastructure is now a fast growing, commercially attractive and increasingly competitive market. The Paris Agreement, and the national determined contributions that underpin it, are creating a demand for what will be generations of new investment into low carbon infrastructure projects.

As these projects are brought from the drawing board into construction, the pounds, dollars, euros etc. will be well accounted for. But what of the green impact of these green investments? Who will be measuring that? And on what basis?

There has been some good progress in developing methods for measuring negative environmental impact through the important work of CDP, Carbon Tracker and the Climate Disclosure Standards Board. But that’s only half the story. There hasn’t been enough progress in consistently measuring the positive environmental impact of investments.

When we started work in 2012 there wasn’t a way of measuring green impact that was meaningful to us. There was no methodology with sufficient academic and scientific rigour that could be applied pragmatically, day-in and day-out, through a commercial investment process.

So we built our own: an approach to measuring green impact, designed by investors for investors.  We published a description of how we do this in our green investment handbook.

But this isn’t an abstract idea. It’s an approach we’ve used to measure the green impact of each of our 80 individual green infrastructure investments.

We want to share how our approach to green impact measurement can be applied to actual projects. That’s why we’ve published an example of one of these reports – for the Galloper Offshore Wind Farm.

We’ll publish more in the months ahead to show how this same methodology can be applied to a portfolio of green infrastructure investments and even a sector of the green infrastructure market.

We have evolved our methods over the past four years, and we know the evolution will continue. We hope that by sharing our approach, and how we apply it in practice, we can help advance the idea. We believe that this subject is a vital tie to bind the work of infrastructure developers and investors to the climate goals agreed in Paris.

We have adopted a mantra from the Scot’s physicist Lord Kelvin – ‘What gets measured, gets managed’. These reports are how we bring that mantra to life.