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Private equity funds

Clients of leading private banks and pension funds are calling on their investment managers to offer impact investment options.

Prominent family offices are actively seeking investment partnerships that can help them source, vet, and execute impact investment deals in sectors ranging from sustainable agriculture to healthcare to urban infrastructure.Private foundations are seeking to partner with investment banks and development finance institutions to make impact investments in areas related to their social missions.

Despite this momentum, the weakness of market mechanisms (such as rating agencies, market clearinghouses, syndication facilities, investment consultants) creates debilitating inefficiency that hampers investment. The nascent industry remains beset by inefficiencies and distortions that currently limit its impact and threaten its future trajectory: Investors are largely unable to work together effectively given a general confusion of terminology. This limits investors' ability to share knowledge and co-invest, which perpetuates inefficiency and fragmentation in the field. The absence of basic market infrastructure, like standards for measuring and benchmarking performance, constrains impact and capital flows.

The combination of these factors - barriers to information flows and collaboration, a lack of infrastructure, and an underdeveloped ecosystem of intermediaries and services providers - threatens the evolution of the impact investing industry and, ultimately, its ability to realize its potential for social and environmental impact

From a global perspective, the financial implications are enormous. A 2002 UNEP Finance Initiative study estimates that the cost of environmental damages of the 3,000 largest listed companies is valued at $2.15 trillion dollars and that more than 50% of company earnings are at risk owing to such damages.

The results of this are people having the tendency to linger in a beautiful and comfortable environment, and businesses see the benefits of people staying longer which helps to sustain the local economy

Beautiful and meaningful places and spaces create an intransient value to the locality and a sense of pride to the community.

Place-making provides a way of seeing the world through a more sustainable filter, and provides a platform to make the necessary changes and move towards sustainable lifestyles and behaviours.

culture to one that nourishes life and nurtures communities

It is a return to the local and the re-localisation of our economies and communities. Our task is to build resilient places and communities that can easily adapt to the many challenges and imminent changes.

We all know and gravitate towards such places, and yet we keep building ‘empty’ places with little or no sense of ‘spirit of place’. Some would blame globalisation and consumerism on the demise of local communities

Enlightened developers and councils have utilised the new place-making tools to deliver such environments: Rouse Hill Town Centre in northwest Sydney, Flinders Lane (Degreaves/Centre Way) and Victoria Market in Melbourne epitomize the power of place-making.

Partners are critical to the future success and image of a public space improvement project.

They can be local institutions, museums, schools and others.

The vision needs to come out of each individual community.

The best spaces experiment with short term improvements that can be tested and refined over many years! Elements such as seating, outdoor cafes, public art, striping of crosswalks and pedestrian havens, community gardens

encountering obstacles, because no one in either the public or private sectors has the job or responsibility to “create places.”

Starting with small scale community-nurturing improvements can demonstrate the importance of “places” and help to overcome obstacles.