Impax and FTSE launch broad, global environmental index

Impax, the specialist environmental investment company, has joined forces with index company FTSE to launch the FTSE Environmental Opportunities All-Share Index.

The index comprises 450 constituents from the sectors of alternative energy and energy efficiency, water treatment and pollution control, and waste technologies and resource management.

To be eligible for inclusion, constituents, which are drawn from the FTSE Global Equity Index Series, must demonstrate that a minimum of 20% of their business comes from environmental markets or technologies. Impax said the environmental investment universe was no longer the domain of small technology start-ups, but a rapidly developing area of the global economy.

Ian Simm (pictured), chief executive of Impax, said environmental investment was a compelling growth story which was now firmly in the mainstream. ‘To reflect this, the sector needs a credible benchmark for investors,’ he said.

Will Oulton, head of responsible investment at FTSE, said the index would appeal to both institutional and retail investors looking to gain exposure to companies that were transforming their businesses to benefit from environmental markets.

The index provides an investible and transparent measure of the performance of the global environmental technology sector and is available for investors to use as the basis of structure products, exchange traded funds (ETFs) and index funds. Impax said that Russell Investments had already licensed the index for an environmental technology multi-manager fund.

The launch is the second of a series of collaborations between Impax and FTSE. Earlier this year the FTSE Environmental Technology 50 (ET50) index was unveiled, made up of the fifty largest pure play environmental technology companies by market capitalisation worldwide.