There is significant consensus on the imperative to address, at speed, the three-pronged challenges of climate change, social inequity, and natural ecosystem degradation. However, in the mission to increase deployment of climate finance, are impact practitioners guilty of employing the same practices that led to the problem in the first place – investments that are biased to VC/PE attributes such as valuation, equity, exit, and so forth – in short, financial returns-first?
Increasingly, impact ecosystem practitioners recognize the need for citizens to become active participants in creating the decarbonized cities needed for our future. Simply put, mainstream movements require mass participation. The onus is on us, the impact community, to democratize impact (investments) – to create and provide the right products and services for a mindset shift in citizen participation – not only as a consumer – but also as an investor.
This session illustrates such an offering by MinusCO2 – an impact/climate-solutions start-up out of Mumbai, India that uses a partnership model of retail participation (public and not high-net-worth focused). The engagement is values-based and purpose-driven, namely, reduction in CO2 is good for planet earth and the society. The promised intention is impact – to simultaneously deliver both environmental and financial returns. In less than 3 years, and thanks to this pool of retail impact/climate investors, MinusCO2 has grown – 22 partners and USD 1 million AUM of distributed clean-tech assets (solar, EV infra, storage, etc). To fuel further growth, it now attracts additional institutional impact and mainstream capital, that too on a non-collateralized basis.
We are confident this approach lends itself across the diversity of socio-ecological sectors – sustainable housing, waste management, WASH, restoration and regeneration of natural ecosystems, etc – and want to exhort other impact entrepreneurs to leverage retail participation for their success. This is especially true of the emerging and developing markets where institutional capital is scarce, costly, and a critical hurdle for social enterprises. It is important to point out, that while our illustration of MinusCO2 is as a for-profit social enterprise, the thesis of leveraging purpose-oriented retail impact capital, is readily applicable to NGOs.
