It’s only thanks to Mistra’s bold investment that we exist. As far as I know, there had never been an investment like that in the environmental and climate area in Sweden. Mistra’s really big contribution from a research viewpoint was that, with its flexible long-term initiative, it gave us the opportunity to take on big, complex issues.

Although this initiative has now ended after 12 years, I hope Mistra will continue with this type of long-term investment. For us researchers to be able to address the greatest public challenges, brave research funders are needed. Mistra is one of the few that have had both the courage and the strength to take on that role.

In 2007, research groups were already working successfully on environmental issues on a broad front. What changed when the Centre was formed was that groups with different research specialities gathered under one roof. That helped us build up well-functioning interdisciplinary research on how people and the environment interact.

Compared with many others, we spend more time defining which questions to try and answer. At first, it’s a slow work process, but it helps ensure that we often ask relevant questions.

One advantage we have is not only working towards the same goals, but also literally sitting together. Having coffee and lunch together gives more depth to our cooperation than is possible in more virtually assembled groups. Early on, this created a cooperative atmosphere that helped us to be rated in the first review, back in 2009, as a world-leading research centre. Building strong collaborations with international research groups over the years has been equally important for the Centre’s success.

Sometimes people mistakenly think working on conceptual terms is all we do. That’s not true; although we do work on these concepts, our actual research is ordinary, basic and data-driven.

On the other hand, a term like ‘planetary boundaries’ has educational value when we want to communicate research results. The concepts also work well when we cooperate with others. Although we initially have different ways of expressing ourselves, the concepts give us common ground to start from.

It’s huge. Back then, we struggled to find forms of interdisciplinary cooperation. Work processes that are now in place and are more accepted. Today, instead, we have changes in policy and society’s development to grapple with. At the same time we realise that, with growing fact resistance, it’s increasingly important for us to remain a strong scientific voice.

We also see that when it comes to climate and environmental policy measures, there is increasing political disquiet. One insight is that if unless we work in parallel on issues like justice and equality, we won’t be able to achieve sustainable development. So we’re now trying not just to describe the negative impact of environmental change. It’s equally important to show what a good life can be like in a world of 10 billion people.

The dividing line is traditionally between the companies selected and those that are excluded. This, in turn, depends on whether their management is active, rather than the more passive, index-linked kind. For a long time, Mistra has worked with small-scale, active managers who pick out good companies for small, concentrated portfolios that are believed to help bring about a more sustainable world. Many large-scale managers’ ultimate concerns are more a matter of costs and spreading risk. What’s more, for many good, small-scale and active managers, receiving an unrestricted amount of capital isn’t feasible and would cause their models to fail.

It’s generally difficult to find good, active managers with concentrated portfolios that, over time, exceed the benchmark index. Personally, I believe in the idea of stockpicking — actively seeking out and finding the really good, sustainable companies. In that way Mistra stands out and has succeeded tremendously well. It encourages us, and I see that Mistra’s approach is beginning to be more widespread.

One major challenge ahead is to get active investors to succeed better in relation to those who invest passively. Active management has had problems in attaining the same results as those who spread their risks. For example, stocks in a particular part of the IT sector comprising the FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google) companies have been extremely successful, and people who haven’t invested there have found it difficult to make high profits. If they also have relatively high charges, it’s hard for them to find convincing sales arguments.

All enterprises have challenges. There are stakeholders whose expectations of  ‘sustainable companies’ are too high. In general, they’re a bit better than companies that aren’t sustainable. But the difference isn’t always a massive one. What’s sustainable can also vary from one issue to another, and over time, after all.