Financially Feasible and Sustainable - Reviewing Academic Literature on Sustainability related Investment Studies

Abstract

Sustainable investing primarily means the ideology of sustainable investing puts sustainability into the core in investment decisions. Here, the sustainability related issues include e.g. climate change and environmental destruction/protection matters. Sometimes companies are forced to renew their operations and investments to more sustainable direction, as they face legal requirements and have to do it just to stay in business. But in reality, we do not achieve most environmentally friendly investments through political and legal pressure. In generally, the concept of sustainable investments has long been established in professional environments such as insurance companies or institutional investors, but its overall picture is still a bit vague. This vagueness is especially evident, when it comes to private companies’ sustainable investments and there is lot of scope to do further research within the matter. This particular research work provides an opportunity to learn, investigate and analyze how private companies and municipalities could aggregate value and exploit their business opportunities when applying financially feasible sustainability practices. A systematic review has been carried out in scientific literature, taking the Sustainable Development Goals promoted by United Nations as the base definition of sustainability. Along with governments and private sector investors, the insights provided by this search may also be of interest to economists and researchers for further research.