Category Archives: Private Equity

Senior leader buy-in proves key to successful ESG programs in Private Equity

By | Published: April 5, 2012

Lee Coker, Project Manager, Environmental Defense Fund's Corporate Partnerships Program In our past few blog posts about our Green Returns project in the private equity industry, we’ve highlighted several environmental, social and governance (ESG) best practices that are emerging across the sector. One critical element of a successful ESG strategy that we have not yet [...]

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Sustainability Boosts Returns for Private Equity Funds: Part III

By | Published: March 29, 2012

By Andrew Malk, Founder and Managing Partner of Malk Sustainability Partners (MSP) Part III: The Fine Print of ESG Underwriting In the second installment of this series, we highlighted how private equity fund managers can drive value creation across their portfolios by integrating efficient resource management expertise into operational teams and broader corporate strategy, as [...]

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Harvard Business Students Debate KKR and Sustainability

By | Bio | Published: March 28, 2012

Thirty-five years ago, Milton Friedman wrote a famous article for The New York Times Magazine whose title aptly summed up its main point: "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits." Never mind that most companies don't pay the full price for the pollution they create, or the health and environmental impacts that [...]

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Private Equity Gets A Little Less Private

By | Published: February 24, 2012

By Lee Coker, Project Manager, Corporate Partnerships Program, EDF Last week The Carlyle Group (Carlyle) released its 2011 Corporate Citizenship Report.  At first glance this may not seem like a big deal.  Many leading companies are now reporting on their environmental, social and governance (ESG) activities.  What's significant about this report is that it's a [...]

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Sustainability Boosts Returns for Private Equity Funds

By | Published: February 3, 2012

By Andrew Malk, Founder and Managing Partner of Malk Sustainability Partners (MSP) Part I: Introduction to Environmentally-Driven Value Creation for General Partners With the recent presidential campaign attention paid to Bain Capital, it seems likely that 2012 will be the year that Americans become better acquainted with the private equity sector. Despite managing hundreds of [...]

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Smart Investments see Green: KKR reports savings and growth in third year of the Green Portfolio Program

By | Bio | Published: December 21, 2011

Today, private equity giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) announced the third year of results for its Green Portfolio Program, a project we launched together in 2008. We piloted the program with only a handful of KKR companies and our goal was to demonstrate that private equity firms are well-positioned to take advantage of environmental management [...]

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Private Equity: Breaking down the barriers of climate-related investment

By | Published: December 15, 2011

By Euan Marshall, Program Manager, Environmental and Social Development, IFC Addressing the climate finance gap will require investment across many asset classes. There is a particular need to fund small and growing businesses that are developing innovative low carbon products and services. According to a recent IFC report [PDF], Private Equity (PE) is particularly well [...]

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Private Equity and EDF Climate Corps: A Growing Relationship

By | Published: December 14, 2011

By Lillias MacIntyre, Corporate Partnerships, Program Associate Mutual benefit is an essential characteristic of a successful relationship. At EDF – and especially within Corporate Partnerships – we continue to merge and strengthen the relationships within our networks to form alliances that work. In May, I wrote about the increasing synergies between our Green Returns and [...]

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Private equity changes ripple across the pond

By | Bio | Published: December 5, 2011

Over the past few years we have been working with The Carlyle Group (Carlyle), Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), and other industry leaders to develop new best practices that create environmental and business benefits for our partners, and ripple effects across their industry.  Our goal is to make measuring and managing environmental performance a standard practice [...]

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Bank of America, TIAA-CREF, and CalPERS oh my!

By | Bio | Published: June 3, 2011

These are just a few of the institutional investors that are proactively focusing on energy efficiency as the market has begun to recognize the lucrative returns in this asset class.  Last week, Bank of America announced a $55 million program that will work with community development finance institutions to promote retrofits of old buildings. Bank [...]

Also posted in Behavior, EDF Climate Corps, Energy Efficiency, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Innovation, News Commentary, Partnerships | Leave a comment