Center for Financial Stability

Subscribe to CFS Updates

Sustainable Investing and Environmental Markets
Opportunities in a New Asset Class

Richard Sandor, Nathan Clark, Murali Kanakasabai, and Rafael Marques

Environmental asset classes are not a hope for tomorrow but a reality today. This new asset category promises to grow dramatically in the 21st Century as financial analysts, investors, and corporations around the world try to find ways to profit or reduce costs while promoting environmental social benefits. Sustainable Investing and Environmental Markets: Opportunities in a New Asset Class presents a groundbreaking new way "to do well and to do good". With a combination of over 50 years of practical experience in the field of environmental finance, Richard Sandor, Nathan Clark, Murali Kanakasabai and Rafael Marques provide a solid preliminary understanding of the promising and transformational new investment category of environmental assets. Three broad asset classes — air and water; catastrophic and weather risk; and sustainability — are covered across 12 chapters which analyze how these environmental asset classes are currently being incorporated into commodities, fixed income, and equity instruments and what the future holds for the field.

Richard Sandor is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Environmental Financial Products LLC, which specializes in inventing, designing, and developing new financial markets. A financial innovator known as the "father of financial futures," he has been at the epicenter of environmental and financial markets for more than four decades. He founded the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), the European Climate Exchange (ECX) and the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange (CCFE). Dr Sandor is also the author of Good Derivatives: A Story of Financial and Environmental Innovation, published in 2012. In July 2013, Dr Sandor was named a Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor.

Murali Kanakasabai is Managing Director with Environmental Financial Products, LLC. Prior to this position, Dr Kanakasabai served as Senior Vice President with the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) and its affiliates where focuses on research and education in greenhouse gas emissions markets, new product innovation, management of emission offsets and International business development. He is frequently invited to speak at industry conferences and educational seminar around the world and has contributed extensively literature on environmental markets.

Rafael Marques is Managing Director of Environmental Financial Products. Prior to this position, Mr. Marques served as Senior Vice President of the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) where he was actively involved in all phases of the feasibility and design phases of the Chicago Climate Exchange and worked on the program's membership outreach and expansion into Latin America. He also previously worked as a researcher at the Brazilian Embassy in Washington, where his responsibilities included research and analysis of trade-related issues.

Nathan Clark is Vice President of Wabashco LLC, a clean fuels, carbon offset and renewable energy development company and formerly a Managing Director of Environmental of Financial Products, LLC. Prior to his work at EFP, Mr Clark was Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Offset Programs for Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). In that capacity, Mr Clark managed the process of defining and implementing project-based emission reduction initiatives. He served as Chair of the Subcommittee on Permanence for the Novecta Soil Carbon Sequestration Standards Committee and was a member of the Greenhouse Gas Evaluation Task Group of the American National Standards Institute.

Buy the book