Vision
ESG stands for "Environmental, Social & Governance", known as the three central factors for measuring the sustainability and ethical impact of an investment in a company.
VP Capital believes that improving ESG factors can have a significant impact on the performance of a company and recognizes the growing importance of this topic. Therefore, we wanted to see what our portfolio looks like in terms of ESG and what it takes to become a pioneer with the companies we invest in. For each of VP Capital's own companies, an ESG inventory was made and a roadmap was drawn up to substantially increase the ESG score within 5 years to a "best in class" level.
CO2 compensation
The annual ESG scan of our own companies calculates, among other things, the CO2 emissions of each company and draws up a roadmap with concrete measures to reduce them. VP Capital has decided to offset the remaining CO2 emissions from its own companies by planting trees via WeForest. We are planting 80,597 trees in Zambia now to eventually compensate around 10,000 tons of CO2 for 2018. We aready made a first donation to WeForest earlier, with which 5333 trees were planted in a project in Brazil.
Read more about our collaboration and the WeForest project in Zambia here.
Ambition
For the companies Batenburg Techniek, Mediahuis, HAVEP, VP Landbouw and Q-Lite we are ready with this ESG inventory. ESG is placed on the agenda at Board level every quarter to discuss progress. The five-year plan, as well as the results, are updated every year.
Our goal is to continuously improve the total portfolio score every year.
You can also read about the other building blocks of VP Capital's sustainability model: innovations, donations and impact investments.