I have long exclaimed by investing and partaking in natural resource efficiency we will be doing our best to mitigate climate change and global environmental degradation. Shut off the lights. Turn off the tap. Reduce, reuse, recycle. This is a bottom-up approach, and it is one that is being fully embraced by Impax Asset Management, a $4.2 billion global investment firm with offices in London, Hong Kong, New York, Washington, D.C., and Portland, Ore.

Impax calls its strategy “resource optimization” and it is exactly the right way to go about impact investing: Figure the best business case scenario for growth within a sector and allow social malevolencies to be trounced by market efficiencies.

If only more investment managers could fashion their investments this way.

Impax clicks off just four clear-cut reasons why investing globally in resource optimization makes sense:

• Growth in global population and living standards is accelerating demand for resources world-wide.
• Markets are responding with products and services that optimize the delivery and efficient use of these resources.
• High-growth companies are providing solutions in energy efficiency, renewable energy, resource/waste recovery, water, food, agriculture and forestry markets.
• Investors are seeking broad access to diverse, high-growth markets.

Impax provides a lot of data to back up its investment policy, from bigger appetites for meat to the number of people living in water-stressed areas (check out www.impaxam.com).

In any event, all this is to prove what we should and likely do know innately—there is an under-allocated growth opportunity that we are seeing unfold before our eyes as the world starkly changes around us.

Notice, no one is talking about carbon emissions, nor global warming, nor policy, nor pie-in-the-sky infrastructure revolutions. This is the ground-beneath-your-feet type of stuff. Through this prism, the world of investing becomes a much more logical place and the opportunities borne out, easier to see and identify.

It’s time for more investors and advisors to open their eyes and look at the world this way; it’s how real change will occur.