Setting targets as part of a business plan
The Invest Europe guidance on climate change for private equity investors is developed to provide practical support to actors and stakeholders in the European market seeking to integrate and advance climate change considerations in their investment processes and management strategies.
The first part of this Guide introduces climate change factors to GPs and LPs at the start of their journey in addressing climate change. It includes practical tools and guidelines for identifying climate change-related risks and opportunities in private equity portfolio companies, complemented with practical business cases. The second section of the Guide focusses on how to engage with portfolio companies on reaching shared climate goals. It aims to help GPs engage in dialogue on climate change issues with their portfolio companies, providing the tools to enable positive conversations and facilitate concrete actions.
This third part of the Guide is aimed at GPs and their portfolio companies who are ready to move onto the next phase of their climate journey. This part serves as a next step following parts 1 and 2. It focusses on integrating target setting into your business plan as a pathway to decarbonisation. The Guide showcases different tools on how to evaluate climate impact as a way of achieving set targets in line with global climate goals.
There are several ways to transition to a net-zero future – we will address a wide spectrum of pathways to make this Guide as useful and practical for as many and diverse types of users as possible.
Proud sponsors of the climate change guide
Argos
At Argos, we aim to support sustainable growth and value creation going beyond a purely financial approach. We firmly believe that corporate social responsibility enables a company to improve its outlook for growth and manage risks more effectively. Such an approach makes it possible to reduce resource consumption and to improve operational efficiency, working conditions and employee relationships. It’s a source of innovation and new opportunities.
Argos is an independent European investment fund that supports companies in the transfer of business ownership. It has assisted more than 80 entrepreneurs, focusing its investment strategy on complex transactions with emphasis on transformation, growth, and close collaboration with management teams. Argos seeks to acquire majority interests and invest between €10m and €100m with each transaction. With more than €1bn under management and 30 years of experience, Argos operates from offices in Brussels, Frankfurt, Geneva, Luxembourg, Milan and Paris.
Astanor
For the past 70 years, the agrifood industry has invested in quantity over quality, resulting in a food system that is outstripping the planet’s resources and perpetuating global health crises. Astanor backs impact-driven entrepreneurs with disruptive, scalable solutions to transform agrifood from one of the leading causes of social and environmental harm into the greatest regenerative solution.
As an early-stage impact investor in the agrifood sector, we are facing multiple challenges: investing in technology-driven solutions that can scale rapidly to respond to today’s urgent climate and social crisis, supporting our companies over the long term to scale their positive impact with growth and quantifying our contribution to global goals in a transparent and honest way. Transparency and integrity are at the core of Astanor’s approach, leveraging science-based assessments of the positive impacts and negative externalities of our portfolio companies’ solutions to ensure we support and scale solutions that will bring the agrifood system back into planetary and social boundaries.
Blackstone
Blackstone is a leading global investment business investing capital on behalf of pension funds, large institutions and individuals. Our mission is to create long-term value for our investors through the careful stewardship of their capital.
We believe that ESG principles are crucial to developing strong, resilient companies and assets that deliver long-term value for our investors. While ESG is a vast and growing field, we have chosen to prioritise decarbonisation, diversity and good governance, as our areas of focus.
Drawing on our decade of expertise in reducing carbon emissions, we partner closely with portfolio companies to help them implement near term decarbonisation plans informed by science. We have committed to a target of 15 percent carbon emissions reduction, in aggregate, over the first three years of our ownership in instances where we control the energy usage. Through these efforts we are helping our portfolio companies be part of a lower-carbon future.
We are also investing heavily in businesses that support the energy transition. Since 2019, Blackstone has committed nearly $10 billion in investments that we believe are consistent with the broader energy transition.
Investindustrial
The urgency to act against climate change is well established and mainstream. Stabilising the climate will require strong, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and reaching net zero CO2 emissions.
Investindustrial has formalised its GHG emission reduction targets for 2030 in line with the 1.5°C pathway described in the Paris Agreement. For the firm to also achieve net zero means that all operational and financing activities within the portfolio must result in net-zero GHG emissions. The firm’s focus on climate is longstanding and includes such milestones as becoming carbon neutral in 2008 covering direct and indirect emission, becoming carbon neutral for its share of investments in 2015 (scope 3 category 15), setting ambitious carbon targets and developing a climate mitigation strategy in 2016, and finally, becoming carbon positive across all active Investindustrial funds in 2020 with all portfolio companies becoming carbon neutral for their operations.
Whilst we are proud of our accomplishments to date, they reflect only the foundation for the hard work we must do in the years to come. A decarbonising economy represents both a tremendous challenge and opportunity for business, and our companies must be prepared for both.
Industry standards
Climate change
Read the other parts of our Climate Change Guide.
Back to the homepage Introduction to climate change Engaging portfolio companies