By: Steve Wallace, AllAboutAlpha.com Editorial Board

I remember being introduced to SRI (Socially Responsible Investing) when I started my career at a financial planning practice in Australia.  That was well before the turn of the century and the subsequent ascendancy of SRI (and its cousin Environmental, Social and Governance policies or ESG) as an investment criterion.

Over the ensuing years SRI and ESG investment products have come in and out of favour.  The main reason for this on-again off-again relationship between these funds and their investors has been performance – or more specifically, the difficulty in attributing that portion of a company’s performance which results specifically from its ESG policy.

That issue remains today, but so much attention has been lavished on climate change and environmental sustainability that these topics may have finally become part of the mainstream investing consciousness.

Private equity managers, by virtue of their in-depth analysis of company strategy, are particularly well positioned to determine whether ESG is a secular or a cycle trend.  So what do private equity investors think of the integration of ESG criteria into private equity decision making?  This is a question posed in a recent report by the Novethic Research Centre based on a survey of French private equity managers.

According to the survey, less than a tenth of private equity firms were involved with “environment funds” per se… More…