About 21C

21C is involved with responsible / sustainable investing since 1994.

Begin 2008 Marcel de Berg - founder of 21C - was looking how to make responsible / sustainable investing more concret and stumbled on Plan B of Lester Brown. When reading Plan B he was looking for what is investable for an investor and how can the investor be connected to the ideas of Plan B.

In September 2008 21C organized a succesfull conference "Plan B 1.0 for Investors". The reactions were very positive on this initiative. Organizations asked to proceed with this idea. This resulted in the "Program Breaking the Investment Barriers for Plan B".

The program evolved rapidly in a special way by meetings with persons that seems to be on the same wave length.

One special meeting by Marcel de Berg

On December the 12th at the 'Beat the Heat' festival I met Leida Schuringa. Leida was selling books realted to climate solutions. It was quite crowdy at the stand. I had picked up some books and was studying them when Leida came to me and she almost direcly asked me "What I was doing".

I told her that I was organizing a conference around Plan B with Lester Brown and Herman Wijffels. She knew about Plan B (can happen at such a conference ;) ), she also said that Herman Wijffels was in the board of wisdom of the organization she was involved with, "The Center for Human Emergence". Ok, some interesting links so far.

I told her also that I was going to do a study on what are the barriers for investors to invest in the ideas behind Plan B. Leida than said that her organization had a partner (is Gaiasoft) that specially developed a tool for working on climate solutions with large groups (Meshwork). Leida said that this could be something for me also.

After a few days I googled and found the tool online. It looked very promising. An hour later I received an email from Leida with some more information about Meshworking. In the articles she sent me a Meshwork meeting in Brasil was decribed. The goal of the Brasil meeting is to reduce CO2 by 80% in 2020 . At that meeting Lester Brown gave input for the conference. OK, the coincidence is growing.

But on top of all, I saw that the meeting was supported by a Dutch organization, which is linked to the Center of Human Emergence named, The Hague Centre! So much coincidence that seems almost meant to be. So I made contact with Peter Merry of The Hague Centre and he was very enthousiastic about the idea to connect the investor to Plan B.

Peter introduced me to Morel Fourman of Gaiasoft and together with Morel we developed the idea of a market place.

So now we have set up the structure and it is time for you to join this journey.

Activities 21C

21C focus on advising, designing and implementing sustainable and responsible investment strategies that can help lead to a sustainable world in the 21st century.

The primary target groups of 21C are those asset managers, banks, pension funds and insurers who realizes that future (system) risks and opportunities will be most likely be related to themes, such as: climate change, water scarcity, demographic trends, transformation towards a sustainably energy society, tension caused by poverty, consequences of lost of biodiversity, disappearing forest and vegetation, etc..

21C sees as the ultimate challenge in portfolio allocation and risk management how to create a portfolio that incorporates long-term sustainability themes across all asset categories, sectors and countries.