CREATING CHANGE
Our Impact
At Carlyle, we invest for impact across all of our businesses. From due diligence through exit, our approach at Carlyle has always been to partner with management teams to improve all aspects of a business. We do this because we believe that building better businesses generates lasting value creation, which has been the focus of Carlyle since our founding.
The Impact of Better Businesses
We Build Better Businesses
In close partnership with all of our businesses, we are focused on building sustainable businesses by:
Sustainability at Carlyle
ESG considerations play an increasing role in our investment processes. Our commitment to sustainability influences strategy, brings new ideas for operational efficiency and helps unlock value. Pursuing tailored ESG strategies that focus on material issues for individual businesses is one way we’re driving impact at our portfolio companies.
In addition to our work with portfolio companies, we’re equally committed to sustainability within our firm. In 2018, we became the first major private investment firm to operate on a carbon-neutral basis.
Impact at Carlyle Our Covid-19 Response
Our CEO Kewsong Lee On Investing or Impact
Everything we do at Carlyle is about how we can have the maximum impact to make businesses better.
Results In Numbers
We work collaboratively across funds, industries and geographies to bring success to our partners.
Pension funds are our largest group of investors, representing almost half of our investor base.

Our funds have generated more than $130 billion in investment gains over 32 years, which have helped provide retirement security for teachers, police officers, firemen and other public and corporate-sector employees.

We work to improve and grow our active portfolio companies, which employ more than 960,000 people globally.

As a result of multiple years of investment, we are making progress on the composition of the boards of our portfolio companies. In 2016, we created a goal within our US corporate private equity business to have diverse boards for all of our majority-owned company boards within 2 years of taking control of the company. At the time, 38% of eligible boards met the goal. Four years later, that figure has risen to 88% overall and 100% in our flagship US Buyout funds. And in 2020, we expanded our portfolio company diversity goal to achieve 30% diversity of all directors in corporate private equity controlled companies around the world by 2023.
In 2021, Carlyle secured the largest ESG-linked private equity credit facility in the US for $4.1 billion and the first facility to focus exclusively on advancing board diversity. Carlyle structured this revolving credit facility for its Americas corporate private equity funds with the price of debt directly tied to the firm’s previously set goal of having 30% diverse directors on the boards of Carlyle corporate private equity controlled companies within two years of ownership.
Carlyle will continue its efforts to work closely with its portfolio companies to achieve its board diversity goal, with measurable KPIs. Learn more here.

Diversity at Carlyle
More than 50% of our $246 billion AUM is managed by WOMEN AT CARLYLE
Sandra
Horbach
- $43b
Ruulke
Bagijn
- $58b
LAuren
Basmadjian
- $29b
Pooja
Goyal
- $5b
By the Numbers
Our Portfolio
Across all of our portfolios, we look to make a lasting impact.
Electricity generation is one of the largest sources of global greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for approximately 28% of U.S. emissions alone – almost two-thirds of our electricity comes from burning fossil fuels. As renewable energy costs continue to fall, regulations tighten, and the energy transition accelerates, however, there is a large and growing investment opportunity in building the renewable energy capacity required to power a lower-carbon US electricity grid.
Learn about how our Carlyle Renewable and Sustainable Energy Platform helped establish Cardinal Renewables and:
- Develop and sell solar power generation assets across the US;
- Model out total potential carbon emissions abatement capacity of specific projects; and
- Open up distinctive opportunities to drive forward the energy transition

We track ESG data so that we can make better investment decisions and build better, more sustainable businesses. Carlyle Europe Partners is in its fourth year of tracking material, bespoke ESG key performance indicators (KPIs) across its portfolio companies, which has led to even more use cases than we originally envisioned. One of those companies is Jeanologia, a Valencia, Spain-based portfolio company at the forefront of sustainable and eco-efficient technologies for manufacturing denim, which focuses on significantly reducing the amount of water and chemical usage in finishing processes.
Learn about how Carlyle Europe Partners collaborated with Jeanologia to:
- Track a series of material ESG KPIs that range from energy management to employee health and safety;
- Save roughly 10.7 million cubic meters of water; and
- Link funded debt directly to specific ESG criteria

In early 2019, when our deal team was looking into an investment in Weiman, they saw a strong operation and a leader in all manner of specialty cleaning products for the home. Our ESG team identified the key growth area for the company: a more-intentional focus on sustainable and safe-to-use products, in response to evolving consumer demand. The investment team agreed, and put a sustainability expert with a background in chemical engineering on the Company's Board of Directors from the outset.
Learn about how our ESG team partnered with Weiman on:
- Getting product lines certified for their environmental attributes;
- Identifying and purchasing Bio-Kleen, a line of products that use enzymes to clean as opposed to harsh solvents; and
- Reducing the company’s manufacturing footprint

Diversity is a central priority for many companies – however, businesses frequently struggle to find ways to expand their hiring pipeline, find more diverse candidates, and reduce unconscious bias in hiring decisions. HireVue’s core business model helps solve these challenges.
Carlyle Partners VII partnered with HireVue, a tech company which provides virtual interviewing and assessment technologies to help companies find the most qualified and diverse candidates more quickly. The effectiveness of the technology is core to HireVue’s value proposition, which has several unique components:
- HireVue’s tech platform helps companies cast a wider net: instead of only sending recruiters to top tier universities for example, HireVue customers can screen video interviews from a wider array of potential applicants – their customers see up to 2x more candidates because they’re not limited by geography or scheduling issues
- HireVue creates a more consistent process: traditional screening practices, such as resume scans, are inconsistent. Structuring the interview process from the start brings consistency and fairness resulting in better, more inclusive hiring
- And finally, HireVue reduces unconscious bias: HireVue’s technology seeks to eliminate unreliable and inconsistent variables, such as which university or college was attended or grade-point average, neither of which has been proven to be predictive of job success

Carlyle believes these selected case studies should be considered as a reflection of Carlyle’s investment process, and references to these particular portfolio companies should not be considered a recommendation of any particular security, investment or portfolio company. The information provided about these portfolio companies is intended to be illustrative and is not intended to be used as an indication of the current or future performance of Carlyle’s portfolio companies. The investments described in the selected case studies were not made by any single fund or other product, and do not represent all of the investments purchased or sold by any fund or other product. The information provided in these case studies is for informational purposes only and may not be relied on in any manner as advice or as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy interests in any fund or other product sponsored or managed by Carlyle or its affiliates. Any such offer or solicitation shall only be made pursuant to a final confidential private placement memorandum, which will be furnished to qualified investors on a confidential basis at their request.

ESG Report Archive
We believe that integrating ESG into our investment activity leads to better investment results and more sustainable returns for our investors and shareholders. Find more information in our annual ESG Reports.
REPORT ARCHIVE