On the Horizon: Green Investment Funds

Green investment funds are those allocated to promote environmentally friendly and resource efficient design in all products and fields of business. These sorts of investments can be made in parks and other nature reserves that incorporate innovative utilities like solar powered facilities, but green as an adage is certainly not limited to these areas. Investment funds for green spaces in urban areas are necessary for the contemporary city to adapt to a climate conscious policy, and green thinking will undoubtedly be the most important financial decisions we can make in the future. Specifically, green investment funds refer to financial backing of companies that support the production of goods and services that are not reliant on carbon based fuels and chemical processes.
Currently almost $1.5 trillion has been invested in “green” or eco-friendly companies that focus on providing alternative energy sources. These include wind power and the construction of turbines that can gather it, geo-thermal harvesting, hydro-fueled installations, and solar power. Unfortunately, this number speaks for a combined sum of virtually all the developed nations’ green investment funds on the Earth, and should be much greater considering the current investments in carbon based energy sources that are over ten times the amount of funds for “green” companies.
This is a fledgling development and the lack of investment funds in green products could be in response to the speculative nature of this field. Compared to the combustion engine that has been a foundation of modern technology for over one hundred years, alternative, eco-friendly, products and practices have been under development for much less time and with much less resources available.
But the unfamiliarity we have with environmentally friendly products and practices can actually pose a benefit of its own. This is one field where our greatest dreams, our sci-fi speculations, can actually come closer to reality. We know helium-3 and other particles associated with the sun’s energy can grant immense stores of power, but we have not made any practical system for harvesting these sources. Aside from energy, eco-friendly implementations that can benefit dense urban spaces are also in the imagination stage, like vertically designed agriculture. This system utilizes the traditional design of a multiple story building where each floor is a stretch of crop and an entire field can be grown right on top of itself. While not necessarily energy-efficient, this is an economically friendly practice in that it conserves space in urban areas. While this sort of theory is still impractical, it is hard to attract investment funds.
Exchange traded funds or EFTs also exist for eco-friendly companies and support companies that are providing products and services in line with their particular goals. Guinness Atkinson Alternative Energy Fund (GAAEX)for example provides green investment funds to companies developing alternative energy sources.