Dr. Paul Saunders:

Sustainable responsible investment, SRI, has everything to do with our investment decisions now. We look very closely at all the SRI, and environmental, social and governance, ESG, factors. We have now started a process of engaging with not just prospective investments but also with our existing investees to gather the information around their sustainability credentials. For these businesses to be successful in the long term, they must have business models well suited to a net-zero world. We are not just looking at the regulations around this context but at the business fundamentals. We are interrogating teams on their way into an investment and, once we are in an investment, helping them to address the sustainability challenges and build models that are robust in respect of the energy transition and the growing weight of regulations that will be put in place around this. This is particularly with a view to addressing the situation where as companies mature and start to raise further rounds of investment, it will be found that gaining access to capital will become increasingly difficult for those companies not ahead of the curve when it comes to sustainability. This is therefore a core focus for us.