Post-Covid Impact Investment Mindset Shift: From Crisis Relief to Resilience Building

FluxHouse™: A Community for Salt Lake City, Utah

Delivering Quality Urban Housing is not just a Social and Environmental Cause. It’s a Good Investment.

We at Fluxus have been addressing the unmet needs and environmental impact of the affordable housing market. This is evermore so important now as the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of high-quality housing to manage and control infections and recovery, particularly for lower income families who are living in overcrowded homes in densely populated areas of the world. According to the United Nations, now half of humanity, which is 3.5 billion people, lives in cities. And over 90 per cent of COVID-19 cases are occurring in urban areas. Turning quality urban housing into a driver for social, economic and environmental sustainability in the Great Reset should be our global goal.

In the new economy, there are several trends we should take into consideration for us to innovate for home delivery today:

• Less stable career paths.
• Greater need for mobility and flexibility.
• Growing acceptance of shared consumption.
• Blurred distinction between homes and offices.
• Virtual businesses proliferate with increased connectivity.
• Machine learning and autonomous decision making in place of white collar jobs.

Meeting those demands requires innovation in the way homes are constructed. Adaptable buildings with customizable layouts are required to enable higher occupancy turnover. Added connectivity also brings future privacy and security concerns for individuals, businesses and communities. In many ways, these issues center on the need to develop integrated new products and services that are inclusive and meet the needs of the entire community.

Urban Resilience requires an adaptive system of modularization, allowing for a need-based growth where urban sustainability and social welfare play the leading role. We have been working on the FluxHouse™ Generative, a tool that sets the universal framework within which social, economic and environmental factors are all valued. Intentional and measurable impact must be woven into the heart of Home Delivery Value Chain. This is no easy endeavor. Yet it must be done, if we are to direct more capital where it is needed most.

Recently, World Economic Forum released a set of universal environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics and disclosures to measure stakeholder capitalism that companies can report on regardless of their industry or region. Organized around the pillars of principles of governance, planet, people and prosperity, the identified metrics and disclosures align existing standards, enabling companies to collectively report non-financial disclosures.

As we see the new normal unfold, Digital Transformation is emerging as a strategic priority to transform many legacy industries. “Across sectors, infrastructure remains one of the least technologically advanced in the entire economy. While other industries have wholeheartedly embraced the Fourth Industrial Revolution, infrastructure has lagged behind. However, this is not due to a lack of innovation in the space. In fact, new materials, new processes and new technologies for infrastructure development are flourishing. The problem lies in finding ways adopt these emerging technologies into the way we plan, design, finance, construct and operate infrastructure. A technological transformation of the industry has the potential to, among other things, improve efficiency, safety and quality of projects while decreasing delays, financing gaps and instances of poor planning – all while helping achieve sustainable and resilience goals.” – World Economic Forum Infrastructure 4.0 Initiative.

In pursuit of Accelerating Digital Transformation to power the Great Reset, we are part of the working group at the World Economic Forum. The group is working on a playbook about becoming Sustainable Digital Enterprise, that includes recommended actions, metrics, indicators, use cases and best practices, to offer practical guidance to ensure digital transformation delivers value across both business and sustainability objectives. 

Today, Impact investing has gone from a niche discipline just a few years ago to a $715 billion market. Many asset management firms such as Apollo Global Management are also venturing into the world of impact investing. “Apollo Impact will invest in education, health care, safety and wellness, resource sustainability, and so-called industry 4.0, which refers to the digitalization of manufacturing and the combination of technologies such as machine learning and cloud computing to enable more efficient production.”

Global economies are taking actions towards Building Back Greener After the Pandemic. “European officials have seized on one in particular—mending battered economies in a way that also tackles global warming, or “building back greener.” Bloomberg renewables reporter Jess Shankleman reports from London on the policies that may bring that dream to fruition, and the sobering realities of trying to do so during a pandemic. Stephanie Flanders from Bloomberg talks with economist and policymaker Lord Nicholas Stern about how he thinks addressing climate change can be a sustainable route to growth.“

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