A Field Guide to Responsible Investing: Asset Management in the Age of Polycrises

For years, responsible investing has been a bewildering precinct in asset management. To many, the idea of aligning your values with your investment portfolio seemed naive. Slowly and steadily, responsible investing morphed from a movement into an industry on course to command $50 trillion in assets by 2025— a third of the capital at work in the markets. And yet responsible investing has remained as difficult to traverse as ever. It’s drawn fire from critics who’ve branded the approach “woke capitalism” whilst more “responsible” generations of investors are poised to marshal trillions of assets of their own into the business - we are at an inflection point.

As a responsible investing practitioner for more than 25 years, author Amy O’Brien has taken part in this revolution in asset management. With geopolitical conflicts, economic instability, and climate change fomenting unprecedented “polycrises”, she believes there is no more effective way to address the challenges of the 21st century than through responsible investing. Like most tectonic shifts in asset management, responsible investing has been complicated, hard to define, and hard to measure. But doing so is not only possible, it's also imperative.

Over nine chapters, the book takes readers on a journey of the evolution of responsible investing, how it works today, why it’s integral to investment considerations, and how we can finally get a grip on its efficacy. It’s time to demystify and unpack this invaluable method for managing our assets, and our futures.

Amy O’Brien is the Global Head of Responsible Investing at Nuveen, the asset management arm of TIAA.

Amy was studying biology as an undergraduate at Boston College when the 1992 Earth Summit sparked her passion for sustainable solutions impacting the environment. She became interested in the role that the private sector can play in advancing sustainability and the connectivity between science, policy, and economics.  During a graduate school internship at the Council on Economic Priorities nearly 30 years ago, she was able to apply that early interest at a pioneering company in the field of corporate social responsibility research and ratings. 

Amy’s unique perspective is informed as a member of the “bridge generation,” whose career has spanned collaboration with industry pioneers and early adopters (NGOs, faith-based institutions) in the 1990s and 2000s, and into the current global commercialization wave and expansion into the “mainstream.”  Amy has deep experience in all major facets of the industry including ESG investment data, ratings, and research; shareholder advocacy and stewardship; integration of ESG factors across a wide range of asset classes; sustainable product innovation; and impact measurement and management. 

Amy was included among the inaugural list of The 20 Most Influential People In ESG Investing by Barron’s Magazine, and in 2021 was awarded ESG Investment Manager of the Year by Women in Asset Management.