Hello, welcome to Impact Insize, the podcast series powered by Astoria Investment Managers.

As we know, impact investing aims to generate measurable, positive, environmental and social impact

while generating financial returns. While it is easier to measure the amount of energy generated by renewable energy plants,

for instance, it is much more challenging to quantify how well a social project meets its objectives.

Today's episode features Jonathan Perney, Impact and ESG analyst at Astoria, providing us with more clarity on how to measure social impact while investing in listed equities.

In terms of impact, environmental metrics are the easiest to measure, or should I say, the least complex.

On the other hand, the measurement

of social impact is even more subject to complexity, but also sometimes subjectivity. Certain

principles, such as the desire not to harm other positive impact activities, are obviously

part of the vectors for both environmental and social impact, but we will see that the social aspect is less uniform,

according to the regions than the environmental issues,

even though social and environmental impacts are often interconnected.

As an example, the climate transition will certainly have an influence on social factors.

We can think of the lives of workers who have based their livelihood on certain activities

that will no longer be meant to continue because of environmental concerns.

This is where a just transition has its importance.

These terms describe the need to avoid unilaterally imposing the burden of these inevitable but necessary changes on workers or disadvantaged communities, for instance.

Without going into too many details on this topic, we understand that in addition to the complexity of the measurements comes even other factors to take care of.

However, the bottom lines remain the same,

namely the sustainable development goals or SDGs.

Around two-third of them are either directly

or indirectly linked to social empowerment.

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