Mainstream asset managers - the people who decide how to invest pension funds and so on - are asking companies questions about climate change. This was the surprising fact I learnt at an event on climate change as business opportunity last week.

If you know your BEX from your IWEX from your NEMEX then you were probably at the SustainabilityLive! exhibition in Birmingham last week. The enormous hall in the NEC was given over to every variety of environmental technology business, covering Brownfield development (BEX), water and waste water (IWEX), energy management (NEMEX). The sheer number and variety of companies taking part was proof of the scale and scope of the environmental technology sector in the UK.

I was chairing a session in the Sustainable Business event on the business opportunity of climate change. One speaker was Adrian Wilkes, Chief Executive of the Environmental Technologies Commission. He showed how higher environmental regulation induces innovation and profitable businesses by contrasting the abject failures of the US car companies with the successes of their Japanese competitors. (A point we made about California in our publication with the ICAEW on Competitiveness and Sustainability.)

The other speaker was Stephanie Meier, the Head of research at EIRIS, the independent provider of investment research on sustainability issues. She had the surprising fact about fund managers.  I had always been told that they weren't interested in sustainability, even the relatively hard and investment-critical facts about climate change. But no, they are increasingly asking 'what is the company's climate change strategy? How might a changed climate affect the business?'. At last! Apparently, the fund managers are looking to invest in the best-in-class performers, and the new sectors that will flourish as we move to a carbon-constrained world.

Other key points:

• climate change opportunity for a business is specific to that business (see Leader Business Strategies for more on this).
• there will be losers and winners. The losers will be incumbents who try to defend the status quo or are unable to change. The winners will be the businesses who really do innovate, and ones in emerging sectors. Obviously, we hope that the finalists of the recent FT Climate Change Challenge will all be winners.
• the opportunities are really uncertain. and therefore really difficult for organisations to know what to do. That is why we created a set of scenarios to help organisations understand their risks and opportunities, and plan for them in a strategic way.

I left Sustainabilitylive! in good heart that there is a UK environmental technology field ready to take us to a sustainable future profitably, if only we can get the right systems in place to accelerate the change we need.