Invest Europe's climate journey

Tracking our climate performance

The climate crisis represents one of the most urgent challenges of our time, and one which we must all strive to minimise the impacts of. In 2021, Invest Europe pledged to play its part in Europe’s shift to Net Zero by 2050, using our position as the association representing the European private equity, venture capital, listed private equity, and infrastructure sectors, as well as their investors, to educate, shape and drive change in our industry’s climate performance.

As part of that undertaking, we made our own ambitious commitment, setting ourselves the target of making Invest Europe a carbon-neutral organisation by 2030.

Our Climate Ambition

Building better businesses is in private equity’s DNA. In today’s world, that means creating and transforming companies to embrace the highest environmental, social and governance standards – of which decarbonisation and minimising climate impact are integral and essential parts. At Invest Europe, we believe that our association has a responsibility and opportunity to support members on their sustainability journeys. This means offering guidance "by practitioners for practitioners" through practical tools, resources, trainings, and webinars, and shaping the right (regulatory) environment to foster positive environmental change. We are deeply committed to working with the private capital industry to help deliver a more sustainable financial system.

Our Climate Ambition covers five key areas:

Delivering on Public Policy

Ensuring that regulation is well-calibrated to enable private markets to play their part, particularly in the field of EU Sustainable Finance

Delivering on Stakeholder Engagement

Engaging constructively with European policymakers and other stakeholders on existing and upcoming initiatives

Delivering on Education

Providing members with training, education and guidance on sustainability issues, while communicating to the world at large about private capital's unique role in responsible investment

Delivering on Industry Practices

Creating a permanent forum for the promotion of best practices on sustainability

Delivering on Leading by Example

Setting ourselves high standards and remaining an industry thought leader on sustainability topics, while helping the industry gradually raise the bar on how sustainability matters, including climate change, can be addressed

Invest Europe’s Climate Performance

Our association’s climate journey has a clear objective. But to know the best path to take, we must first understand our starting point. In 2022, with the help of sustainability consultancy ERM, we began measuring our carbon footprint, across our own operations and value chain. This included our scope 1 direct emissions, scope 2 indirect electricity-related emissions, and scope 3 indirect emissions from upstream and downstream activities.

This process illuminated Invest Europe’s main sources of emissions, and the areas we must target for improvement. The results give a transparent view of our climate impact and enable Invest Europe to be held accountable for our climate performance. We continue to measure our carbon footprint each year, devise strategies to lower our emissions, and set measurable goals.

2025 GHG footprint – 2025 emissions

Purchased goods and services for Invest Europe’s operations and events, downstream transportation related to attendee travel, and employee business travel together account for 96% of our total emissions. Among these, purchased goods and services represent the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, making up over 50% of our total footprint in 2025.

97%

of emissions are from activities outside of the business

While the vast majority of Invest Europe’s emissions relates to activities outside our own business and operations, they are not entirely outside our control. In 2023, we held a Climate Fresk training workshop to ensure that Invest Europe employees were informed and actively involved in our climate journey. The aim is to foster a culture of environmental awareness and empower every team member to integrate sustainability into their work and decision-making processes. This infuses everything we do with a desire to do better and make a difference – for ourselves, our members, and our industry more broadly.

2025 GHG footprint – 2025 emissions compared to 2022 to 2024

Year-on-year changes are influenced by several factors:

Goods and services: The increase in 2025 vs. 2024 is mainly due to additional projects undertaken in 2025.
Downstream transportation: Variations depend on the number of events, the geographic distance between locations, and overall attendance levels.

Next steps to reduce our climate impact

We have decided to adopt a step-by-step approach with the objective of achieving our ambition by 2030:

Phase 1 (2021-2024): Improving data collection and achieving autonomy
Phase 2 (2024-2027): Reducing our carbon footprint and initiating offsetting
Phase 3 (2027-2030): Further reducing emissions and progressively scaling up offsetting

Data is key to understanding and reducing our carbon footprint, while improving our performance on climate impacts within our control. We are working to enhance the accuracy of Invest Europe’s emissions calculations and have initiated a GHG data improvement plan. This effort will primarily focus on major emissions sources – such as purchased goods and services and downstream transportation – which are currently calculated using assumptions and proxy data. Strengthening our data quality will enable us to identify effective decarbonisation actions, track our climate progress more accurately, and further refine our understanding of emissions sources.

In parallel, we have already identified and are working towards emissions reduction opportunities in key areas:

Reduce the climate impact of employees’ business trips
Better understand and track the climate performance of Invest Europe suppliers

In addition, we are committed to communicating with members about our emissions reduction efforts and how they can contribute to this journey.

Ambition is nothing without action, and action requires targets. This must all be delivered with full transparency, which in turn enables accountability. We look forward to sharing more on our path to climate neutrality, and empowering our members to play their part in tackling the climate crisis.