Sarah Murray

For much of her three decades working in the food and agriculture sector, Ruth Kimmelshue had few female colleagues. “For the vast majority of my career, I was the only woman in the room,” says Kimmelshue, who leads Cargill’s animal nutrition and health business — and is the first woman to head one of the US agricultural trader’s five global enterprises. Women have, of course, always been at the heart of farming. In an industry dominated by family businesses — in the US, for instance, they acco…

If challenges go hand-in-hand with opportunities, water should be a prime focus for investors. One quarter of the world’s population lives in countries facing extreme water stress — that is, using 80 per cent of their supply annually. Climate change will put supplies under still greater strain. Governments trying to deliver “clean water and sanitation” — the sixth of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals — face huge funding gaps. Estimates for the investments needed globally for water-related…

It was what many called an iPhone moment: the launch in late 2022 of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence tool with a humanlike ability to create content, answer personalised queries and even tell jokes. And it captured the public imagination. Suddenly, a foundation model — a machine learning model trained on massive data sets — thrust AI into the limelight. But soon this latest chapter in AI’s story was generating something else: concerns about its ability to spread misinformation and…

They make up more than half the world’s extreme poor and more than two-fifths of its displaced citizens. And, as tomorrow’s adults, they are all of its future. Yet few consider children when building investment portfolios — or how those investments might affect them. But this could be changing with the emergence of a new investment strategy: child-lens investing. The approach is a holistic one. Take, for example, pay-as-you-go solar power services for rural or low-income communities in developi…

Most impact investors seek to make positive change by targeting start-ups or companies based on the social, or environmental, impact of their products — from affordable homes to solar power systems. But some are starting to base their investment decisions on the enterprise’s business model or leadership — in other words, the machinery driving the mission. Start-ups focused on creating positive social impact are, by definition, more likely to have business models designed to promote a diverse wo…

Every Thanksgiving, Terrence Keeley asks his relatives to review the funds in their retirement accounts and explain why they selected them. All his younger family members tell him they favour funds investing in line with environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles — because they want to do well, and do good. “And it makes me cry because those funds are doing no such thing,” he says. “They are underperforming and doing nothing to make the world a better place.” Keeley speaks with some…

As the emerging global water crisis gains greater public attention, more start-ups are addressing water quality and consumption in their business plans. And more of them are led by women. For instance, women made up half the candidates nominated for the prize funding component of a 2023 water challenge launched by FoodShot Global. This New York-based network of banks, companies and investors supports young companies developing sustainable food system technologies, by providing funding through e…

In his annual letter to shareholders this April, JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon reaffirmed his bank’s commitment to its diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, saying that they “make us a more inclusive company and lead to more innovation, smarter decisions and better financial results for us and for the economy overall”. There was a time when this statement might have passed without notice among the countless similar pronouncements from businesses. Yet it stood out more than it mi…

New research suggests growing mainstream acceptance. Our sortable table offers a global snapshot of the industry

Helping investors navigate the complexities behind decarbonising hard-to-abate industries will be essential, given the need to attract more capital