The Big Interview: Impax CEO on avoiding 'lazy' ESG acronym and doubling assets by 2030

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As Impax Asset Management turns 25 this year, founder and chief executive Ian Simm talks to Investment Week about why he avoids the ESG acronym, how he plans to double assets by 2030 and new opportunities on the horizon.

Simm's personal journey into sustainable investment began in the late eighties after coming across ‘Our Common Future', the 1987 report by the World Commission on Environment and Development that first coined the phrase ‘sustainable development'. Inspired by the report, he set up Impax Asset Management a decade later, in 1998. The World Bank was its first client, who entrusted the newly-created firm to design and run one of the world's first solar energy investment funds. With a team of less than a dozen employees, in 2002 the firm launched Impax Environmental Markets, currently on...