CSR Design Green Investment Advisory, Co., Ltd. works to achieve environmental and social sustainability and human well-being.
As the representative, I have spent a total of more than 20 years in my career at financial institutions based in Japan, the U.S., and Europe, with a desire to contribute to social and economic development. In the mid-2000s, I was able to get involved in environmental finance, such as renewable energy funds and carbon emission trading, which were new at the time. Later, after experiencing the collapse of Lehman Brothers, my desire to do work that more directly benefits society grew stronger, while I realized that the environment would become a business in the future. With a good connection, I launched our company in early 2010 to link environmental considerations and finance in the construction and real estate sector.
CSR in our company name means not only “Corporate Social Responsibility” but also “Catalyst for Sustainability and Responsibility.” We aim to make significant impact on the world by collaborating with many stakeholders, even if we are a small company by ourselves. By doing so, we hope to indicate the compatibility between the environment and the economy, or more specifically, “Doing well by doing good”.
At the time of its establishment, these ideas were not easily understood locally, but from the mid to late 2010s, the trend of ESG investment and sustainable finance spread rapidly in Japan. During that time, environmental issues such as heat waves and floods caused by climate change, human well-being including physical and mental health and social connections, and social issues such as necessity of regional revitalization became apparent. In the hope of generating impact on these issues, we are proactively participating in the discussions of global initiatives, introducing global ideas/frameworks and advanced case studies to the domestic market to spread such ideas, and providing feedback on the domestic situation and case studies to the global arena.
For example, as a recommended Premier Partner of "GRESB" in the Japanese market, we have been supporting the participation of Japanese companies in the GRESB since 2011, and I myself have been providing a voice for Japan as a member of the committee that decides its standard. I have also been served as an advisor for many years in the activities of the United Nations-supported “Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI)” and the “United Nations Environment Programme and Finance Initiative (UNEP FI)”. In that capacity, in 2018, I had a chance to contribute to the development of the “Positive Impact Real Estate Investment Framework”. Since then, our company has also become a pioneering advisor for impact investing, particularly in the real estate sector.
Furthermore, with the need to enhance sustainability not only in the real estate but also in wider sectors in mind, we are also involved in research activities on trends in sustainable finance and sustainability information disclosure, mainly in Europe, and continue to support disclosure by Japanese companies based on this expertise. In 2019, we became the first service provider in Japan to declare our participation in the “Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD)”, and since then, we have expanded the scope of our activities as a scoring partner of “CDP”, the Japanese secretariat of the “Partnership for Carbon Accounting for Finance (PCAF)”, and a forum member of “Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD)”. As such, we have been supporting the progress of sustainability disclosure, particularly in the real estate, infrastructure, and financial sectors.
We will continue to collaborate with our stakeholders aiming for “Doing well by doing good”.
