ESG

In brief: Qatar Investment Authority poaches Macquarie’s sustainability AD

Chandra Eastwell is now a director of sustainable investing at QIA, a sovereign wealth fund that has been making inroads into sustainability in recent years.

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Qatar Investment Authority has recruited Chandra Eastwell as a director of sustainable investing, New Private Markets has learned.

Eastwell joins the sovereign wealth fund after a 10-year run at Macquarie Asset Management’s Infrastructure and Real Assets business, where she was most recently an associate director of sustainability. In this role, she led portfolio decarbonisation efforts (Macquarie has a portfolio-wide net zero by 2040 target) and sustainability-related due diligence and value creation, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Eastwell may be QIA’s first full-time sustainability professional: NPM could find no previous record of a sustainability professional employed at the fund. QIA confirmed Eastwell’s appointment but did not respond to a query on this point.

QIA has been making inroads into the sustainability space in recent years. It has excluded hydrocarbon-based energy investments since 2020, and in 2017, it was one of six founding members of the One Planet Sovereign Wealth Funds group, a working group for integrating climate change analyses into investments. Read more about QIA’s sustainability endeavours here.

Eastwell relocated from London to Doha this year.