Just over 1% of money in managed funds is now invested in ethical funds. This doesn’t sound like much, but the value of sales of ethical funds in 2006 was £136M, with the total funds being managed in ethical funds at the end of that year being around £5bn.

Financial institutions, whether run by Gordon Gecko or that nice little man who grows tomato plants in the office, are realising that they need to provide funds to match people’s growing concerns over climate change, ethical factors and sustainable development, and so the number of available funds is growing rapidly.

Ethical investment opportunities include ISAs, pensions, unit trusts, credit cards, mortgages and insurance – just about all your financial product needs.When investing, it is still vitally important to ensure you have the right mix of low, medium and high risk investments to meet your investment strategy, rather than just plumping for ethical funds. Just because its ethical doesn’t mean its low risk. In fact greener companies are often smaller companies, and therefore their share price tends to be more volatile. But on the other hand, many of the FTSE 100 companies are not generally considered ethically sound, so tracker funds (generally lower risk share funds) are out. Do you need to put a proportion of money into bonds, or a bank account, for safety? Decide on your strategy first, and then look for suitable funds to meet your needs. And remember that the term ethical investment means many things to many people.

Ethiscore has ratings on an extensive range of green and ethical funds.