Ben McVicar, Co-Head of Infrastructure and Portfolio Manager at Magellan Investment Partners explain that as powerful forces like AI and renewable energy reshape the global economy, infrastructure stands at the centre—providing stability while capturing transformative growth. From data networks to energy systems, these essential assets are driving productivity and decarbonisation alike, offering investors defensive growth in a world defined by secular innovation and structural change.
Sustainable investing has been through plenty of challenges of late. After a string of political and social backlashes, the return of a US president who appears to be opposed to creating a more sustainable future, a rise in greenwashing cases and a challenging period of relative performance, sustainable investing has become more demanding and, arguably, more useful.
Most investors tend to think of systemic risk as something that arrives with a bang, like a banking crisis, a pandemic, or a war. Increasingly, the more realistic systemic dangers are slower to gauge and harder to price. They are an ominous set of interconnected and interacting stresses that have the potential to degrade the very conditions required for markets to compound at all.