Backgrounder: ENDOWMENTS AND RESPONSIBLE INVESTMENT POLICY

Endowment funds are supported by generous donations from individuals, corporations and foundations that play a vital role in promoting a continued interest in the university and in higher education more broadly.

UVic Foundation’s responsible investment journey began in 2012 when it extended its list of investment beliefs to include responsible investing. Three years later, it joined the UN-supported Principles of Responsible Investment (PRI) to assess its progress on how Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors are incorporated into the investment decision-making process of its managers.

Impact investing is defined as a general investment strategy that seeks to create positive social and environmental impacts.

Cary Krosinsky teaches two seminars at Yale: a Residential College Seminar on Business and Sustainability, and co-teaches a Graduate Seminar on Climate and International Energy within Yale Climate and Energy Institute. He has taught at Columbia University since 2009 and advised to Cambridge’s Investment Leaders Group. In 2015, he is lead consultant to PRI on their Climate Change Asset Owner Project and is also consulting to the United Nations Environment Programme Inquiry into the Design of a Sustainable Financial System.

Climate finance action at COP26 in Glasgow earlier in Nov. saw 450 financial groups including banks, insurers and investors with $130 trillion at their disposal, pledged to put combating climate change and reaching net-zero at the centre of their work. Signatories to the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) are now committed to use science-based guidelines to reach net zero carbon emissions by mid-century, and to provide 2030 interim goals.

Read the UVic Foundation’s 2020/21 Responsible Investment Report. 

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