Sustainable Equity

Our Sustainable Equity investment team looks for the leaders of tomorrow.

Generating returns from sustainable structural growth

The Sustainable Equity team invests in companies delivering solutions to the world’s environmental and social challenges. We focus on structural growth opportunities linked to sustainability: decarbonisation, climate adaptation, water, healthcare impact, financial and digital inclusion, and access to education.

Our investment approach blends proprietary sustainability insight, deep fundamental research, and high-conviction, benchmark-agnostic portfolio construction. Through active engagement and KPI-driven reporting, we aim to allocate capital to companies whose growth supports a more sustainable future.

Key facts

  • Established in 2018
  • 2 dedicated strategies – Global Environment, Global Sustainable Equity
  • Positive-inclusion investment approaches
  • Proprietary sustainability research tools and methodology
  • Company engagement to drive positive change

What do we believe?

  1. Sustainability challenges create growing addressable markets distinct from economic cycles.
  2. An unconstrained, bottom-up, high-conviction approach provides focused exposure to sustainable structural growth.
  3. Durable, forward-looking competitive advantages are often mispriced.
  4. Specialist knowledge and proprietary research are required to identify attractive opportunities.
  5. Active engagement helps drive long-term value creation.

The Sustainable Equity investment process

A structured and disciplined investment process
  • Universe screen
    Screens are used to build a proprietary universe. Global Environment’s screen focuses on environmental revenues and quantifiable carbon avoided. Global Sustainable Equity screens for liquidity, sustainable revenues, exclusions and competitive advantages.
  • Idea generation
    A ranking tool for financials, sustainability and competitive advantages guides analysts where to focus their research.
  • Fundamental analysis
    Company analysis draws on insights from proprietary models, management meetings, externalities assessments, channel checks and industry research.
  • Portfolio construction
    Bottom-up portfolio construction is driven by level of conviction, valuation and risk contribution.
  • Engagement and monitoring
    Companies are engaged with on an ongoing basis. Detailed sustainability reports are published annually.
Sustainable Equity - investment process

Quantified impact and engagement reporting

Sustainable Equity report
  • Annual impact reports with company-by-company analysis
  • Extensive sustainability key performance indicators
  • Evaluation of net-zero alignment
  • Full reporting of engagement targets, activity and progress

Global environment impact report Global Sustainable Equity impact report

Meet the Portfolio Managers


Deirdre Cooper heads up the Sustainable Equity team based in London. Her team of experienced portfolio managers and equity analysts have deep expertise in clean technology, environmental solutions, sustainability research and global equity investing. The team works closely with Ninety One’s broader global equity capabilities, enabling investment ideas to be assessed from multiple perspectives. Sustainability research is fully integrated into the investment approach, and supported by Ninety One’s specialist Sustainability team.

Ice cave in Iceland
Sustainable equity - latest insights

Important Information

This communication is provided for general information only and should not be construed as advice.

All the information in this communication is believed to be reliable but may be inaccurate or incomplete. The views are those of the contributor at the time of publication and do not necessarily reflect those of Ninety One.

Any opinions stated are honestly held but are not guaranteed and should not be relied upon.

All rights reserved. Issued by Ninety One.

For further information on indices, fund ratings, yields, targeted or projected performance returns, back-tested results, model return results, hypothetical performance returns, the investment team, our investment process, and specific portfolio names, please click here.