The Skandia Ethical Fund has been relaunched and is aiming to capture investors who want to focus specifically on environmental factors. Skandia Investment Group (SIG) has relaunched its fund by awarding a £74 million mandate to specialist environmental investment manager: Impax Asset Management.

The Skandia Ethical Fund will cover alternative energy and efficiency as well as other environmental factors such as water treatment, pollution control and waste management. Skandia believes Impax will provide investors in the Skandia Ethical Fund with exposure to a wide range of environmental ethical investments.

The plan is to focus on the current upsurge of enthusiasm for ethical investment, but with a broad focus on companies taking on the challenge of people’s environmental concerns. Ian Aylward, SIG head of Alternative Asset Research, says: “With concerns over the environment growing significantly in recent years, refocusing our ethical fund to enable investors to help meet those challenges seems to us to be a wholly appropriate way forward. “Effectively relaunching our ethical fund in this way means we had to identify the best manager to fulfil the role. Having gone through that process we have decided to award the mandate to Impax.”

Impax has been investing in the environmental sector since 1998. The company has already seen its flagship environmental fund double the return of broad equity markets over the past five years. SIG is part of the wealth management division of asset management insurance company Old Mutual which has £285 billion of funds under management. Its sales force covers 22 countries including the UK as well as Europe, the Nordic countries, South East Asia, Latin America and South Africa.