Monday 29 October - SRI and Savings Plans in Asia

	Speakers & Presentations
PANEL DISCUSSIONS: The Agenda for Long-term Investment
Chair: Mr. Brian Pearce, Director, Centre for Sustainable Investment, Forum for the Future Panel:
Ms. N. Cinnamon Dornsife, Director of Financial Markets, Forest Trends
	1 MB	Developing Commercial Markets for the Environmental Services of Forests: Opportunities and Challenges
Mr. Timothy Krause, Financial Institutions Group Manager, East Asia and Pacific Region, IFC
	109 KB	The Agenda for Long-term Investment
Mr. Takayuki Yamamoto, Director, Policy Planning Department, Development Bank of Japan
	328 KB	SRI Fund for Promoting Projects and Enterprises with Long-Term Benefit SRIファンドにおける長期投資への課題

Summary
by Brian Pearce, Chair

The panelists and the other participants in this workshop have explored one of the key issues facing SRI over the next 10 years; how to increase its impact on sustainable development. We have debated some of the barriers to pension funds and other long-term private investors putting their money into asset classes outside listed equities and bonds. The biggest problem seems to be the lack of liquidity for these alternative asset classes. There were some interesting and exciting solutions offered by the participants of the workshop. Cinnamon Dornsife of Forest Trends, described an innovative private equity fund to invest in forest assets and their environmental services, which would take advantage of the additional cash flows starting to emerge from carbon, watershed and biodiversity services. One of the barriers to long-term private investment in assets with significant biodiversity and development impacts in developing countries is risk, either perceived or actual. Risk and risk sharing was the theme of the presentation by Takeyuki Yamamoto, of the Japan Development Bank. He described several initiatives taken by his development bank where, in effect, they shared a portion of the risk attached to a particular project, allowing private investors to achieve their hurdle risk-adjusted rates of return. Tim Krause, IFC, emphasised this opportunity for the development banks to play a key role in leveraging private finance into developing country project with both commercial and sustainable development benefits. The workshop discussion make it clear that there were significant practical difficulties with getting pension funds to invest in many high sustainability impact asset classes, but that ways around these difficulties had been suggested in several of the presentations. The sense at the end of the session was that this was an area of great promise.