Switching to a positively impactful pension is one of the most powerful tools you have to minimise your climate footprint and build your wealth. Read how Pangea Impact Investments based in the South West was founded by Nick Stoop, this week's guest blog contributor, and how he believes that pensions & savings should be invested into businesses that provide positive solutions for our climate and address social inequality.
Is it possible to be truly inspired by your surroundings, landscape, and environment? How many of you feel a boost of energy or creativity when you visit the coast and submerse yourself in nature?
What about the history which has come before in the spot on which you stand? Do you, like me, stop to take in all the historical references you pass? Before looking up those that interest you the most in a local bookstore or online.
Have you ever approached the place you live with the same enthusiasm? What you might have taken for granted can lead you down the deepest and most wonderful rabbit holes.
At the start of the first Covid lockdown, our young family decided to make a move that felt much closer to our hearts. We handed in our notice and packed up the two-bedroom rental flat in London. Our destination, was a quiet fishing village on the southern tip of Devon, Hope Cove.
We had bought at auction a few years prior, a truly dilapidated 1930s bungalow. My wife has a much better eye for projects of this nature and was able to see beyond the mouldy carpets, damp walls, and the leaking chimney breast.
I was able to see beyond the house entirely, looking west along the southern coastline of Devon and Cornwall at the most amazing view.
Our daughter was born a few months prior to our move. As a new parent, I quickly discovered a deeper sense of responsibility. Not only to our daughter but, increasingly, to the natural world around us. It was a strange time for her to arrive on this planet, through the rolling lockdowns and the much deeper sense of isolation that pervaded us more than before.
At least we had the outdoors, and we truly embraced its every season. I remember a fledgling sparrow that sheltered from the prevailing wind behind our house. We’d hear its higher-pitched tweets each morning and quietly go and check on it. Hoping not to disturb it while also trying to encourage it to take flight as its early efforts sent it in a manner of loosely controlled directions.
I also remember standing in our garden facing out to sea and imagining what this rocky coastline had witnessed over the years before our arrival. My wife recently picked up an old chart at a local village fair which indicated the rough locations of the many shipwrecks along this stretch of coastline over the past three hundred years.
Standing on the beach near us, you bear witness to the red-coloured sediments generated when North America collided with Europe some 400 million years ago. It was the study of rocks in this county that led to the naming of the Devonian period, an age that spawned a remarkable variety of fish.
It was with this newly acquired sense of belonging that I decided to establish a business that would go some way to supporting all that had supported us during those difficult days of Covid.
I’d noticed that many of my friends and family had made some significant changes to their behaviour over the past decade in support of the environment. They were all drinking out of refillable water bottles and reusable coffee cups. Some had started to buy organic food and clothing. And most were much more meticulous when it came to recycling household waste or doing their best to avoid it in the first place.
While these were all important steps, I couldn’t help but think of the vast intangible carbon footprint we create every day. Through the savings in our bank account to the underlying investments in our pension. While these are less tangible, over the course of a lifetime they can be even more damaging to the environment around us.
It was with that thought in mind that I recently launched Pangea Impact Investments. We aim to be the best aligned and most authentic personal pension solution in the UK when it comes to investing your pension into global solutions for the environment and social inequality.
Encouragingly, some of the asset management partners we work alongside boast a twenty-year track record which proves that you can invest in this manner without giving up market returns.
We launched as a Pending B Corporation and a member of 1% for the Planet, allocating 1% of our revenue each year to local foundations and charities with the environment at their heart. A good example is the Devon Environment Foundation which was established a couple of years ago to protect and restore at least 30% of Devon’s land and water by 2030.
This brings me full circle to our naming the business, Pangea. In 1915, a meteorologist and astronomer, Alfred Wegener, wrote one of the most influential and controversial books in the history of science, The Origin of Continents and Oceans (1915). Wegener proposed that, in the remote past, the earth’s continents were not separate but formed one supercontinent, Pangea, which later split apart. Wegener died in November 1930 while on an expedition in Greenland. It would be another forty years before geophysicists came to formally acknowledge his findings.
For more information about Pangea Impact Investments.
Website: https://pangea.earth/
Email: nick@pangea.earth
Twitter: @pangeaimpact
The value of your investment can go down as well as up, and you can get back less than you originally invested. Fossil Coast Drinks Co does not provide investment advice.