by Shannon Jayne Peck, reporter

Sustainable investment funds are gaining traction as the primary investment option among millennials looking to align their finances with social causes.

Also known as impact investing or Environmental Social Governance investing (ESG) it focuses investing in companies that are actively making a difference to people’s lives, while they still aim to make a profit.

The ESG indexes boycott the typical well-known investment options in oil, gas, tobacco, and armaments while funding projects in woman’s leadership, solar power, and sustainable business.

The World Economic Forum’s Global risk report outlined extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem collapse as some of the biggest concerns of 2018 along with the overhanging crisis of global warming. We can postulate that these will be the biggest issues for sustainable investment in 2019.

Millennial Finance and investment operations manager Yevaan Sahagian explains: “Socially responsible investing is different to regular investing as managers consider the social and environmental impact of the companies that they invest in in addition to the traditional factors that are considered when making investments.

“sustainable investment companies that basically work on an imaginary sliding scale between focusing on doing good and focusing on making moneyand as the environment is in a worse state now than it has ever been, these funds fill a gap in the market.

“the desire to be socially conscious in consumer decisions is probably more prevalent in the more modern generations as they have social media to show how good they (the companies) are and find others that feel the same way.”

We asked Yevaan what would make the biggest difference in the shift from traditional investment funds to sustainable investments, he said:

“What a lot of firms do now is just broadly lay and exclusions list (of bad companies) over their investment options and then pick from what’s left and don’t think much more about it. What would really change the scene would be if the government put in place some sort of incentives to invest in sustainable funds or something to that effect.”

*Disclaimer: Shannon Peck holds shares in a sustainable investment fund