KiwiSaver investors care if their savings cause environmental or social harm. And many more would care if major fund managers backed up their commitments to responsible investment with action.

The $37 billion NZ Super Fund said it won't invest in companies involved in the recreational cannabis industry.

The move, announced on Monday evening, came on the eve of Parliament debating a bill to legalise medicinal use of cannabis.

The NZ Super Fund, which is New Zealand's giant sovereign wealth fund designed to help pay for NZ Super for tomorrow's pensioners, started the moves to exclude recreational cannabis in September before the Labour-led government assumed power.

There is a rising global movement towards responsible investing, but how can new KiwiSavers know how to invest without causing harm? Rebecca Stevenson caught up with Kiwi Wealth’s Steffan Berridge to discuss the ins and outs of ethical investing.

Millennials are increasingly interested in sustainable investing and in many cases are instilling their social and environmental values in their parents.

While directly not concerning responsible investment, this issue clearly has implications for what we invest in (Jonathan Neal).

Brexit; the crushing of democracy by billionaires; the next financial crash; a rogue US president: none of them keeps me awake at night. This is not because I don’t care – I care very much. It’s only because I have a bigger question on my mind. Where is all the food going to come from?

By the middle of this century there will be two or three billion more people on Earth. Any one of the issues I am about to list could help precipitate mass starvation. And this is before you consider how they might interact.

For more than 40 years, Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi founder of the Grameen Bank and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize[1], has been asserting that the most powerful way to eradicate poverty is to unleash the untapped entrepreneurial capacity of people everywhere. “Poverty is not created by poor people,” he says. “It’s created by the system we built. Poor people are like a bonsai tree. You take the best seed from the tallest tree in the forest, but if you put it in a flower pot to grow, it grows only a meter high. There’s nothing wrong with the seed. The problem is the size of the pot. Society doesn’t give poor people the space to grow as tall as everybody else. This is the crux of the matter.”

Until recently the battle to avert catastrophic climate change – floods, droughts, famine, mass migrations – seemed to be lost. But with the tipping point just years away, the tide is finally turning, thanks to innovations ranging from cheap renewables to lab-grown meat and electric airplanes

New Zealand investment managers may be neglecting their duty to put investors' interests first by taking an exclusion-only approach to responsible investment, a major KiwiSaver provider has warned.

Kiwi Wealth, a KiwiSaver provider which is owned by the government, ACC and the NZ Superannuation Fund, has published a white paper on its take on responsible investment at the New Zealand Responsible Investment Conference in Auckland today.

OPINION: Last week there was an interesting opinion piece on Stuff by Richard Meadows.

Entitled, "The case against 'ethical' investing," the article pointed out some of the very real difficulties with socially responsible investment.

Fair enough, I thought – there certainly are difficulties and there is every benefit to point them out.

However, I turned grumpy when Meadows said that ethical investing won't make a jot of difference and may do more harm than good.

Tobacco, coal and gambling are out and so is Amazon when it comes to a new responsible investment fund.

Auckland based boutique fund manager Pathfinder has launched a Global Responsibility Fund and is taking a tough stance on where it invests.

John Berry, chief executive of Pathfinder Asset Management, said as well as excluding the typical nasties the fund uses a controversy rating system and only picks those with high environmental, social and governance (ESG) scores.