The CSN Workers’ Fund is joining forces with a Dutch investment firm to set up a fund focused on biodiversity.
The initiative from Fondaction and Triodos Investment Management, in the Netherlands, should be used to finance companies and projects contributing to making the economy “more equitable, more inclusive and greener”.
“We aim for the fund to bring together several investors and for it to be of the size of an institutional fund, the objective of which would be to fill the financial gap in terms of investment solutions and natural capital and biodiversity in developed markets , such as regenerative agriculture, sustainable forest management and nature restoration,” says Geneviève Morin, President and CEO of Fondaction.
She expects this investment vehicle to be offered within 12 to 24 months. This is why she says she is not yet able to specify the exact size that the fund will have.
An institutional-sized fund, however, is typically in the hundreds of millions in size.
Geneviève Morin cannot yet say how much Fondaction could release to support the initiative.
She hopes that the fund will attract pension funds, institutional investors, foundations and people with an interest in investing in biodiversity.
The manager specifies that Foundation and Triodos share a common vision of societal issues and the role that finance must play in solving these issues.
“Appropriate” performance
Geneviève Miron wants to attract more funding for projects that go in the “good direction”, that is to say to fight against climate change and the rise in inequalities, in particular.
She argues that an appropriate return should be expected. “It is not because we seek to have a positive social and environmental impact that we give up on generating returns. The return must be adequate to compensate for the level of risk. »
She explains that the links between Fondaction and Triodos have been forged over time in particular because the two partners sit on the investor council of the Global Impact Investing Network, a group of impact investors. “We saw that we had a lot in common. It seemed natural to us to unite. »
The announcement of the upcoming creation of a new biodiversity fund comes two weeks before the 4e edition of the Sustainable Finance Summit, which will be held on May 14 and 15 at New City Gas in Montreal.
The Sustainable Finance Summit is organized by Finance Montréal, the Quebec financial cluster with the ambition of making sustainable finance a key element in the development and influence of the financial industry in Quebec.
Geneviève Morin underlines that a delegation from Triodos must participate in this event in order to encourage the pooling of expertise and allow in-person meetings to refine the work.
The announcement of the partnership between Fondaction and Triodos also comes less than three months after the launch of a biodiversity fund by Gestion Lester, a Montreal asset manager.
Lester maintains that his biodiversity fund is the very first of its kind in the country and that the objective is to grow capital by investing in publicly traded companies benefiting from long-term trends linked in particular to environmental protection. , agrotechnology, agriscience and aquaculture.
reference: www.lapresse.ca