For impact investors, avoiding carbon emissions has long been one of the clearest ways to quantify whether a company is delivering environmental impact. There is a good reason for that. Carbon is measurable, methodologies are relatively mature and technologies can often be compared with conventional alternatives. But carbon tells only part of the story.

Investors are beginning to look beyond individual impact indicators and towards the systems in which companies operate: the resources they use, the ecosystems in which they depend, the pollution they prevent and, in areas such as food, the consequences for human health.

For European VC firm ECBF, that shift has emerged from five years of investing in and measuring the impact of companies across its portfolio.