SEVERAL major sustainability themed events will take place in Singapore this week, including the International Finance Corporation's Green Finance Week, Temasek's Ecosperity Conference and Sustainable Solutions Expo 2018. How we can mainstream sustainability investing in order to achieve impact at scale has become a major topic in the investor community globally as well as in Asia.

Historically, private wealth investors in Asia have lagged behind their North American and European counterparts in their involvement in impact investing. This has changed significantly in the past few years. In 2016, wealthy individuals in the Asia-Pacific invested US$55 million into Credit Suisse' main impact investment fund launched in partnership with Singapore's UOB Venture Management. Last year, Singapore's largest local bank DBS offered its first impact investment to private banking clients who went on to buy 60 per cent of the US$8 million Women's Livelihood Bond created by the Impact Investment Exchange (IIX), the world's first listed exchange for impact investing companies based in Singapore. Over the three years to 2016, impact investing grew by more than 25 per cent in eastern and South-east Asia.

Environment, social and governance (ESG) considerations have gone beyond being a theme for private wealth investors to being adopted within the core portfolio of institutional investors. In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been implementing his three-arrow policy, with the third arrow - structural reform - considered as a long-term sustainable growth strategy. The Japanese government enforced a corporate governance code on all major business corporations, and "stewardship code" on major investors. Japan's Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF), the world's largest pension fund with over US$1.3 trillion in assets under management, believes that ESG aligns with governmental policy. GPIF is trying to grow its portfolio implementing ESG, by creating an ESG index and monitoring the ESG implementations of its asset manager. It recently raised its allocation of ESG investments to 10 per cent of its equity holdings, up from 3 per cent in July 2017. Such GPIF activities can also be found in many business corporations and other Japanese big players.