Sustainability drives value. Ambienta’s vision reconciles economic development and sustainability. Far from being an economic cost, we believe that sustainability is instead a key source of competitive advantage for those companies that provide solutions to global environmental issues.

Ambienta defines environmental impact beyond the narrow focus of greenhouse gas emissions or climate change, which have been emphasized as environmental investments for a decade. Environmental sustainability encompasses the entire spectrum of natural resources – not only energy – as well as all types of pollution affecting water, air, soil and human health. This holistic approach to sustainability, seen as a theme rather than a sector, allows us to target investment opportunities with a positive Environmental Impact across virtually all human activities, leading to an estimated €3 trillion (and growing) market opportunity.

Ambienta invests exclusively in businesses whose products or services have a positive impact on Resource Efficiency or Pollution Control. Impact has to be at the origin of growth, undisputable, measurable and material. These companies grow because their products and services are increasingly needed in order to cope with the pressure on natural resources and the negative effects of pollution.

Sustainability-driven opportunities

The world is embracing environmental sustainability. Industries, regulators and consumers have been creating significant underlying demand for products and services with strong sustainability features across many different industries and sectors. Ambienta’s sole focus on this theme since inception, and its subsequent 16 years of experience in selecting and evaluating environmental sustainability-driven investment opportunities, make the firm a pioneer with a long-standing and unique expertise.

Sustainability is a theme, rather than a sector

While ten or twenty years ago the attention was focused on the power generation industry or on heavy industries with large polluting operations, today it is clear that environmental sustainability concerns all sectors. From consumer goods (cosmetic products, packaging), to food production (value chain inefficiencies), to fashion (textile industry polluting watersheds) and even IT services (productivity jumps): sustainability is as pervasive a trend as digitalization. With the world population set to grow towards 10 billion by 2050 and consumers’ standards growing globally, the number of investment opportunities driving environmental impact is only set to rise.

Sustainability, a theme across cycles

The environmental trends of Resource Efficiency and Pollution Control rely on the long term global macro-economic trends of a growing population and rising consumer standards. These long-term trends allow Ambienta to invest through economic cycles and temporary downturns. If we want to feed, dress, serve and provide access to services to a growing number of people, we will have to learn to do more with less and take care of our home, the Earth. This trend is here to stay, forever.

Sustainability & Strategy team

Ambienta has created the Sustainability & Strategy function, a centralized team fully dedicated to understanding how Resource Efficiency and Pollution Control trends shape industries and create investment opportunities. The team continuously maps and researches investment opportunities, in collaboration with senior industry experts in various sectors, enabling Ambienta to create fruitful discussions with entrepreneurs and C-level executives and originate transactions, forge proprietary relationships and effectively screen investment opportunities.

Our proprietary impact measurement methodologies

Since its foundation Ambienta believed true material and measurable environmental impact of products and services is the evidence of their competitive advantage and long-term growth opportunity. Over time, we developed proprietary methodologies to assess such impact across asset classes. The Environmental Impact Analysis (EIA), was born and still is our Private Equity tool to assess the impact contribution of our portfolio and pipeline to Resource Efficiency and Pollution Control via 11 different metrics. This award-winning tool has been appropriately adapted to also be applied to Private Credit in our Ambienta Credit division. Finally, the Environmental Sustainability Scoring System allows us to assess total econometric exposure to environmental sustainability for our listed funds and it is based on the Ambienta Sustainability Index (ASI), which defines it at single holding level.