Ethical businessObituaryTessa Tennant obituary
Key player in the world of green finance who co-founded the Merlin Ecology FundTessa Tennant, who has died of cancer aged 59, was led by her ruling passions into a position of huge influence in the world of green finance. Realising the need to reconcile planetary limits with the power of directing investment, for 30 years she was at the forefront of a movement that has encouraged fund managers to invest money in a more socially and environmentally responsible fashion.
Tessa co-founded the UK’s first green investment fund, the Merlin (now Jupiter) Ecology Fund, in 1988. She was later head of responsible investment at NPI (now part of Janus Henderson Investors), where she managed massive amounts of institutional money on socially and environmentally responsible lines – for instance by refusing to take shares in high-polluting companies or those involved in child labour.
In 1991 she co-founded the UK Social Investment Forum, which lobbied for the wider adoption of responsible investment in Britain. She was also involved in setting up what is now the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative, an alliance of more than 200 financial institutions that seeks to improve understanding of how banks, insurance companies and other major investors can take account of environmental, social and governance factors when deciding where to put their money.
In addition Tessa co-founded, in 2000, the Carbon Disclosure Project, a successful programme that has encouraged major companies to make annual disclosures of the greenhouse gas emissions they generate, and which works with them to cut those emissions. Now known as CDP, the project has grown dramatically since its inception, and works with more than 6,000 companies across the globe, including most of the biggest corporations.
Tessa was born in Bletchingley, Surrey, to John Cormack, a pilot, and Jean Davies, the daughter of a Liberal peer. After leaving Prior’s Field school, in Godalming, she gained an environmental studies degree at King’s College London.
Working after her degree at the environmental thinktank Green Alliance, she spotted the power that was latent in fund management, and noted that few investors at the time were routinely weighing up the environmental impacts of their decisions. Fewer still considered that excellent long-term returns could be had by investing in business that respects the natural world.
After an internship in the US with the green asset management firm Trillium and its inspiring leader Joan Bavaria, she co-founded Merlin (now Jupiter) Fund Management in London and was its head of social investments. There she helped to build up an investment team that featured many people who fanned out into new responsible investment operations across the world over the next quarter of a century. At NPI she built and led a team that grew sustainable assets under management faster than any other group in the UK, winning large institutional mandates.Seeing the implications of billions of far eastern consumers joining the global economy, in 2000 she relocated to Hong Kong. There she set up the Association for Sustainable and Responsible Investment in Asia, which is now part of Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), an international network of investors pledged to incorporate social and environmental issues into their investment analysis and decision-making processes.
After helping to create the Carbon Disclosure Project, she became its first executive chair and then a board member until 2014 – encouraging, sometimes embarrassing, corporations into measuring and reporting their emissions. Through defining and disclosing their climate impacts, companies saw the need to bring them down – reducing demand for fossil fuels and driving finance into low-carbon technologies.
Over the last 20 years of her life Tessa developed an impressive portfolio of directorships. These included non-executive directorships at the Green Investment Bank and Solarcentury, a solar electricity company. She was possessed of an exceptional combination of energy, social confidence and free-spirited charm that brought her many admirers – her advice was sought by politicians including Tony Blair.
In 1983 she had married Henry Tennant, whose father became Lord Glenconner. Tessa and Henry had a son, Euan, shortly before Henry recognised that he was gay. They separated but remained close; in 1990 Henry died from complications of Aids. Tessa took over his forebears’ mansion in the Scottish borders, the grade A-listed Glen House, with accompanying farmland, cottages, steadings and offices.
In 2006 she met Bill Staempfli, a New York architect who was in Oxford on sabbatical studying environmental policy, and they married in 2007. Responsibility for managing the Glen estate without the financial means to run it was a legacy that Tessa occasionally thought she could do without, but in partnership with Bill she brought the farm back in hand by managing it organically, planting new native woods, tackling a backlog of repairs and hiring it out for film and fashion shoots.
In 2012 Tessa discovered she had ovarian cancer – recording her treatment with wry commentary on a blog. In 2017 she found it had returned – though she spared her friends the knowledge. She declined further treatment, spending her last months at Glen with Bill, Euan, and her two grandchildren, who all survive her.
One of her last acts was to be driven by Bill in their all-electric car to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, to collect the insignia of her OBE from the Queen.
Teresa Mary Tennant, green investment campaigner, born 29 May 1959; died 7 July 2018
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