Environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors are increasingly seen as relevant for financial analysis, security selection and asset allocation and are applied by investors with global, cross-sectoral portfolios (universal owners) as well as those who pursue dedicated “responsible investment” strategies. These factors can be applied either for negative, positive exclusionary screening or they can be and are often implicitly integrated into mainstream investment analysis. ESG information is also relevant for risk assessment across multiple horizons (short, medium and long term).

The effectiveness of ESG integration into investment strategies depends on the extent to which companies’ disclosures effectively convey useful (i.e. material for investment decision making, reliable and unbiased, accessible, comparable) information. There is also a general acknowledgment that the current poor quality of reporting Environmental (e.g. climate change) and Social (e.g. Human capital) factors is an impediment to their use.

To address the shortfall in companies’ ESG reporting, various country, regional and international initiatives have focused on enhancing ESG-related reporting requirements including the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), Climate Disclosures Standard Board (CDSB), Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) and the Financial Stability Board (FSB) Task Force for Climate Disclosures. The European Union has also recently issued the Non-Financial Information Directive that is applicable to over 6000 companies.

This 75-minute webcast (10:00 to 11:15 a.m. EDT) on 19 September 2017 is aimed at investors and interested parties and it will feature speakers from influential ESG reporting standard setting bodies. The webcast will have the following primary objectives:

• To discuss principal investor needs for ESG information and a few practical examples of what good ESG reporting for investors would look like
• To highlight similarities and differences across the main ESG reporting frameworks
• To provide an implementation progress update including the level of adoption of the main ESG reporting frameworks including SASB, GRI, IIRC, CDSB and FSB recommendations and if/how these frameworks have been or can be incorporated into country and regional reporting requirements (EU Non-financial directive, other country-level Narrative reporting/Management, Discussion and Analysis requirements)

This is an archived version of a live webinar that took place 19 September 2017.