All Things Sustainable

Investors are increasingly calling on companies to reflect climate-related risks in their financial results. In September 2020, global investor groups representing more than $103 trillion wrote an open letter asking companies and their auditors to include climate-related risks in financial reporting. Accounting standard setters and international auditing boards are also requesting that firms pay m...

On June 17, 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden signed legislation making Juneteenth a federal holiday. In this episode, we're looking at how corporate America is changing its approach to diversity — and race in particular. June 19th, or Juneteenth, marks the official end of slavery in the U.S. in 1865. But the ugly systemic racism that slavery was built on endures. In 2020, the murder of George Floyd...

Regulators and supervisors around the world are increasingly concerned about the effects of climate change on financial stability. So they're turning to climate stress tests to amass key data on financial institutions' exposure to potential stranded assets and their ability to manage risk. Since the 2008 financial crisis, stress tests have become a critical tool for regulators to gauge how well ba...

Last week the ESG world saw a major shakeup at one of the world's largest oil majors. Specifically, at Exxon Mobil's annual proxy meeting, shareholders voted to replace three board members with directors put forward by a small activist investor group — known as Engine No. 1. The group claimed Exxon was not moving fast enough to address climate change and that the board needed a fresh perspective t...

What do Chipotle, an air conditioning company and one of the world's largest activist investors have in common? They're all tackling the challenge of how to incentivize executives to advance corporate sustainability goals. In this episode, we talk with Chipotle Head of Sustainability Caitlin Leibert about the company's plan to tie 10% of annual executive incentive bonuses to sustainability goals....

As more companies look to adopt ESG-friendly strategies, they sometimes run up against the challenge of finding the financial justification for doing so. Furthermore, opponents of ESG initiatives often question whether such efforts cost companies more money than it brings them. This is the heart of the debate over ESG – are companies sacrificing financial returns as they move to become more social...

The European Union's new Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, or SFDR, is expected to drastically change the scope of sustainable investing by providing greater transparency and increasing disclosure. And this is a particularly big deal for the private equity world, which has historically relied on self-regulation. Broadly speaking, private equity refers to investments in or ownership of pri...

We've seen an explosion of companies setting net zero targets in 2021. That prompted us to ask: What comes next? After you set a decarbonization goal, how do you go about meeting it and measuring progress? To answer these questions, we talked to some of the world's largest companies — Walmart, AT&T, Duke Energy and State Street Global Advisors — in a recent S&P Global webinar . This episode of the...

Hundreds of companies around the world have made ambitious promises to purchase only wind, solar and other types of clean electricity to power their operations. But many of these corporations aren't buying actual physical electricity from renewable sources. Instead, they are snapping up incredibly cheap instruments known as unbundled renewable energy certificates, or RECs, which allows them to mak...

As countries across the world set out plans to bring their emissions to net zero by 2050, financial institutions are increasingly setting their own carbon neutrality goals. Limiting global warming to 2°C by 2050 will require $3 trillion annually in investment, according to an estimate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and banks will play an integral part in channeling that financin...

Major oil and gas companies are beginning to set aggressive decarbonization targets, but the path ahead for them is riddled with challenges. The latest episode of S&P Global's ESG Insider podcast takes a deep dive into what net-zero goals mean for those energy companies.   We'll hear from Ed Daniels, an executive vice president and the head of strategy at Royal Dutch Shell plc, about the company's...

Heading into the 2021 proxy season, investors are increasingly focused on equity issues, climate change, and the broader role of companies in society. Shareholders filed at least 435 ESG-related shareholder proposals for the 2021 proxy season, according to the respected Proxy Preview report.   In this episode, we explore three emerging shareholder proposals.   One asks companies to give investors...

Last week, State Street Global Advisors released its annual asset stewardship report. With nearly $3.5 trillion in assets under management, the firm is one of the world's largest asset managers. In 2020, it voted in more than 19,000 meetings and engaged with over 2,400 companies. In this episode, we hear from Ben Colton and Rob Walker, co-heads of the firm's asset stewardship program. They tell us...

World Water Day was March 22nd, and we're marking the occasion by looking at the looming threat of water scarcity and the lack of investor appetite for financing water-related projects. According to the United Nations, 2.2 billion people globally lack safely managed drinking water, and 4.2 billion people do not have safely managed sanitation. The U.N. also warns that water scarcity could displace...

New sustainable finance disclosure regulations came into force in Europe on March 10 as part of the EU's push towards making the economy greener. The new Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, or SFDR, is expected to drastically change the scope of sustainable investing by providing greater clarity and transparency and increasing disclosure. Fund managers will now have to disclose environmenta...

Investors, customers and employees are paying increasing attention to corporate diversity. That was true for gender in the wake of the #MeToo movement, and it has been increasingly true of race following the death of George Floyd in the U.S. But data is lacking, especially around racial and ethnic diversity. In this episode, we explore a first-of-its-kind diversity report that provides a much-need...

Investors and banks have less than a year to comply with the European Union's new taxonomy for sustainable activities. In this episode, we explore the challenges financial institutions face in applying the taxonomy to their portfolios — something the Biden administration is sure to be watching as it tackles its own climate goals. Starting in January 2022 investors must explain how they use the tax...

Investor pressure is growing for companies and financial institutions to assess and disclose their exposure to climate risks such as wildfires, sea-level rise, hurricanes and other extreme weather events. But in a new report, a handful of climate scientists in Australia warn that many existing climate models are extremely nuanced and were not designed with a business-specific application in mind....

Over the last year, 30 of the world's richest countries have poured an unprecedented $14.9 trillion into stimulus spending to help revive their pandemic-hit economies. Some hoped that this massive wave of spending would turbo-charge investment in greener industries, such as electric cars, efficient buildings and renewable energy. But has that actually happened?  In this episode of the ESG Insider...

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink made waves in the ESG world last month by pushing companies to plan for a net-zero emissions future. His annual letter also committed to taking more concrete steps within BlackRock to enable the decarbonization transition. In this episode of the ESG Insider podcast, we dive into BlackRock's own net-zero strategy. We talk to experts about what it means and how much further...

Stakeholder capitalism — the idea that companies are responsible for their role in society in addition to making money for shareholders — has taken on new meaning thanks to COVID-19. It was the buzzword among major players in the ESG world like BlackRock CEO Larry Fink as well as heads of government at the Davos summit last week. In this episode of the ESG Insider podcast, we dive into stakeholder...

New U.S. President Joe Biden has made climate change a priority and is setting the nation on a much more sustainability-focused path than his predecessor. Just days into his term, Biden had already has taken dozens of executive actions, including rejoining the Paris agreement on climate change and ordering a review of rules the Trump administration finalized in the last days of its term. In the la...

In this final episode of 2020, we'll talk with experts about what key ESG themes they expect to unfold in 2021. State Street Global Advisors' EMEA Head of ESG Investment Strategy Carlo Funk outlines the firm's ESG priorities for the year ahead, while proxy advisory firm Glass Lewis' Director of ESG Research Courteney Keatinge describes why COVID-19 will continue to be a key theme behind shareholde...

This special pre-Thanksgiving episode puts a spotlight on the meat industry that is supplying the turkeys and other poultry, pork, fish, and beef products many Americans will be feasting on for the holiday. The meat industry has been hard hit by COVID-19, as the pandemic has exposed frailties in everything from supply chains to production processes and associated greenhouse gas emissions levels to...

U.S. financial regulators need to step up in the fight against climate change, according to one of their own. Rostin Behnam, a commissioner at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, talks to ESG Insider, an S&P Global podcast on environmental, social and governance issues, about a report released in September by a panel of nearly three dozen Wall Street, energy and sustainability executive...