Principles for Responsible Investing

PRI: Who What When Where Why How

October 20th 2007 01:00

: UN Principles for Responsible Investment: PRI

What are Princples of Responsible Investment and Why should you care about them?

The Principles of Responsible investment are the guidelines set out by the United Nations for Fund Managers to create a Global benchmark for responsible investing. Why should you care? Well we all have money invested somehow with our Superannuation, the more pressure we put on large companies to sign up to these Prinicples the more they will have to embrace the philosophy; and this will make the world a better place: money talks.

The Aim of the Principles is to simply add the conscience element to investing. Yes we all want superior returns but signatories of the PRI have to take other things into consideration when making investment decisions. The key things taken into consideration are Environmental, social and Corporate governence factors. By taking these factors into consideration before investing signatories are encouraging corporates to improve their performance in areas such as Environmental Impact (Carbon Emissions), Human Rights. The prinicples incorporate the United Nations global compact and encourage corporations to embed these principles in the way they do business. corporates are encouraged to have set policies in areas such as human rights, labour standards, the environment and anti-corruption.

We all know that money makes the world go round and you can pretty much say that dirty money is responsible for a lot of the Damage to the Environment, terrorism, human rights violations and the list goes on. If large corporations are cut off from investment because they don't adhere to standards then they will not survive, the more money that flows into good corporations the more good will be created.

These principles are a unique way to get financial markets and leaders from the investment community to contribute to the objectives of the UN and simply make the world a better place to live in.

Many Australian Financial insitutions have signed up, and 8 trillion dollars of money under management has already committed to this project globally

but f you can believe it this is nothing...... the UN Web site has great links and has some great stuff if you want to go and check it out. CLICK HERE

The more we care the more they will do.
cheers

Louie