Recently, a new investment trend has arisen with a view to capital gain from investment in companies whose businesses support environmental sustainability and the reduction of climate change. The chart below shows the current web search interest (on the last day of 2007) in “Climate change” as registered by Google Trends.

This site, Climate Investing aims to provide wide research of the sector, companies involved, and opportunities for investment. Of course, all companies have some involvement in environmental sustainability, however new companies are presently emerging with direct involvement to combat climate change with their products and services. These companies present the purest investment opportunity in the sector, and are thus the main focus of Climate Investing.

One way to understand the current interest in the sector is with a simple Google survey. This is also a useful way of providing a current benchmark for comparing and measuring the growth of sector interest. As I write, Google returns the following numbers of websites on a range of relevant searches:

745,000 for “climate change” investment
414,000 for “climate change” investor
265,000 for “climate change” investing

1,520,000 for “clean energy” investment
556,000 for “global warming” investment
538,000 for “renewable energy” investment

None of these searches presently register with Google Trends, though most of the phrases register without the “investment” qualification, with results available via these links:

“renewable energy” - a trend since 2004 or earlier, top regional interest:

“Clean energy” - since 2005, top regional interest:

“Climate change” - a trend since 2004 or earlier, top regional interest:

“Global warming” - a trend since 2004 or earlier, top regional interest:

The main observation here is that interest trends have picked up since in late 2006 for “climate change” and “global warming” (the latter being notably less popular in the US), also for “clean energy”, but the trend has been relatively steady for “renewable energy” (which is a “deeper” green than clean energy that has a broader catchment of technologies, including carbon sequestration and other methods of reducing CO2 emissions of coal burning power stations).

In general, in terms of internet search interest, there is a growing trend of interest in climate change, which may be an indicator of what some are calling a paradigm shift presenting a new long term investment opportunity.