November 16, 2020

On Monday, November 16th, Croatan Institute joined the US SIF Foundation in releasing its 2020 Report on US Sustainable and Impact Investing Trends. The Trends report has become the leading go-to resource on the state of sustainable investing in the United States. This year’s report identified more than $17 trillion in sustainable investing assets at the beginning of 2020.

Croatan Institute’s team has been involved in surveying, researching, and analyzing data for this report for the past 15 years. The report provides extensive data on environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing by 530 institutional investors, 384 money managers, and 1,204 community investing institutions.

Ellen Dorsey, Executive Director of the Wallace Global Fund, a leader in mission related investing and a funding partner of Croatan Institute, noted, “Amidst compounding crises, it is not sufficient to simply fund good causes; we must also align our investments with our mission. We support the US SIF Foundation’s research as a critical tool to track crucial trends in the industry and ensure our own investments remain in alignment with our mission to support people-powered movements, to advance democracy and rights, and to fight for a healthy planet.”

Highlights from this year’s report include:

• The Trends report counts two main strategies as sustainable investing: ESG incorporation—applying various environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria in investment analysis and portfolio selection—and filing shareholder resolutions on ESG issues.
• The total US-domiciled assets under management using sustainable investing strategies grew from $12.0 trillion at the start of 2018 to $17.1 trillion at the start of 2020, an increase of 42 percent.
• This is 33 percent – or 1 in 3 dollars – of the total US assets under professional management.
• The top three specific issues for money managers and their institutional investor clients are climate change/carbon emissions, sustainable natural resources/agriculture and board issues.
• From 2018 through the first half of 2020, 149 institutional investors and 56 investment managers controlling $1.98 trillion in AUM led or co-led shareholder resolutions on ESG issues.

Read the full press release by the US SIF Foundation, or learn more about report’s findings here.

The executive summary is available here.