Book Review: 21st Century Investing

RESPONSIBLE investing, sustainable investing, impact investing, social investing, ethical investing, ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing - labels abound for the space in which investors add non-financial considerations to the traditional management of risk and return.

Now we can add a further term, "system-level investing," the key theme of 21st Century Investing: Redirecting Financial Strategies to Drive Systems Change. The authors, William Burckart and Steve Lydenberg, CFA, are co-founders of TIIP, the Investment Integration Project.

The book characterises investors as conventional, sustainable, or system level. "Systems" are classified as either social, financial, or environmental and include areas as diverse as consumer safety (social), fair and honest markets (financial), and climate stability (environmental).