In the course of one week in May 2019, climate change activists disrupted a U.K. pension’s conference and called for local authority schemes to divest from fossil-fuel companies, while the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, Norway’s GPFG, decided to allocate part of its assets to unlisted renewable energy infrastructure, and a big European institutional investor created a sustainable development director position reporting directly to the managing director.

IREI’s VIP Infrastructure conference (formerly i3) reached its 12th year in operation in June in Toronto. In VIP Infrastructure’s early days, many institutional investors — particularly in the United States — were new to infrastructure, and much of the discussion and presentations at the conference were generalized, theoretical and not too specific. Investors would describe their interest using terms such as “educational,” “getting their feet wet” and “information gathering,” and while some of those still apply, what was clearly different at the 2019 event was a focus on the specific and the concrete — everyone is on board with ESG principles, for example, but how are actions based on these principles monitored and reported at a construction site or a power plant, and what is their impact on company and asset performance?

Climate change has added urgency to investors’ efforts regarding environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors. The $230 billion California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) has been at the forefront of addressing such issues, adopting an investment policy to mitigate ESG risks in 2008. Recently, Christopher Ailman, CIO of CalSTRS, spoke with Loretta Clodfelter, editor of Institutional Real Estate Americas, about the system’s sustainability endeavors. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Based on YTD 2019 data, more than half the capital raised by private equity infrastructure funds during the past three years was committed to global/multi-regional strategies. (A multi-regional fund is looking at more than one region, e.g., Europe and United States, but is not truly global.) Approximately 22 percent of capital raised by funds closing during that same period were Europe-focused, while another 20 percent of the total capital raised went to North American strategies.

Despite Uber’s recent disappointing IPO, the rideshare market is expected to continue its explosive growth, and that will affect transportation infrastructure in a number of ways, some expected and some yet to be fully understood. According to Global Ridesharing: 40 Billion Rides and Counting, by Sharespost, customer spending on ridesharing globally could grow to $400 billion by 2021, up from between $175 billion to $225 billion this year.

The internet is something we rely on for a variety of everyday activities, from sending emails, to streaming movies, to finding the locations of our favorite food trucks. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, while most Americans go online several times a day, a quarter of us are online essentially constantly. While many other technologies are just as saturated into our lives as the internet, such as electricity, few are as invisible as the internet.