What is impact materiality, you ask? And how is it different from financial materiality? A fine and important question, listener! In this episode we take you through all the details you need to parse through the most important sustainability-jargon out there. Including, an explanation of the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, or the CSRD, which has its first required reporting cycle due next year.  

MSCI’s Sustainability and Climate Trends to Watch 2024 explores key themes that could shape the world of ESG investing. Here we touch on three of them: extreme weather, the regulatory aspects of AI and investing in nature via the voluntary carbon market. 

ESG has always been different things to different people. But some of its newest critics suggest that ESG investing is being used to impose liberal ideologies on companies, their investors and their employees. We take a closer look at this backlash in the US, including proposed legislation.

Music: “Curious Play” by PhilLarson (License Code: YFUS65RN4A [Envato Elements])

Amid a seismic shift in the ESG and climate landscape, we identify key trends companies and investors need to be cognizant of. Beyond the road to net-zero, issues such as supply chains, labor management and biodiversity could impact portfolios. 

COP27 underscored the need for action on corporate climate pledges, the importance of data and a series of initiatives to spur public and private investment for developing countries. We review some of the key developments for companies and investors.

The largest source of many companies’ carbon emissions come from their suppliers. We look at how firms across industries approach this challenge as they work toward their net-zero goals, including the efforts of HP and MSCI.

As the world’s biggest companies work toward net-zero, corporations ask: What do we do about our suppliers? Meanwhile, ESG investing truly has gone mainstream (with the regulatory attention to prove it). We review these trends and emerging risks.

ESG trends impacting investors in 2022 range from evolving regulation and the receding of greenwashing, to the push for change in energy production and the role of capital. Each presents risks, and opportunities, for investors in the years to come.

ESG ratings are widely used in active management and ESG indexes, with a growing focus on climate change. This has increased debate around two questions: Why are ESG ratings so different across providers? And how do ESG ratings reflect climate risk?

What’s it like to attend the UN’s 26th annual climate change conference? How have the commitments and pledges played out on the ground? Linda-Eling Lee, MSCI’s Head of ESG Research fills us in during her week in Glasgow, and ESG Research Editorial Director, Meggin Thwing Eastman joins us to provide additional insights and context.

How can investors help accelerate the net-zero transition? This was the central question at MSCI’s 2021 Global Investing Conference. We present the core takeaways from the two-day event, which featured senior corporate and investment thought leaders.

In a sweeping overhaul of its private education sector, China issued new regulations that requires the USD 100 billion industry to register as a non-profit. The move threatened to wipe out billions of dollars of market capital for any publicly listed Chinese education company and ignited a debate around profits, education, and private capital. We discuss what the move means from a local standpoint, a market standpoint, and from an impact investor standpoint. Then we discuss the ongoing sexual harassment controversy at Activision Blizzard that led to thousands of employees walking out of their jobs in protest this week.

Climate. ESG bubbles. Disclosure. Social inequality. Biodiversity. The topics don’t get much bigger — or more systemic. Here’s our analysis of the five ESG trends that will matter most to companies and their investors in 2021.

ESG themes are long-term, but some can emerge with sudden force. We are watching five trends we believe will unfold in 2020 to catapult ESG investing into the new decade.

Looking in one’s backyard for human capital.

Many investors want to stick to their values or beliefs, as well as meet certain financial objectives. How can ESG indexes  help them address these goals?

We examined constituents of the MSCI ACWI Index that had been recognized as innovators on one or more annual lists produced by Forbes, Fast Company, MIT Sloan and the Boston Consulting Group between 2015 and 2018.

California companies with no women on their boards are going to have to quickly up their diversity game.

Is my money helping solve the world’s problems or making them worse? An increasing number of the beneficiaries of public funds, globally, are asking such searching questions about where and how their retirement funds are invested. Understanding how investments have an impact on societal issues can be much more complex and difficult to identify for institutional investors.

When it comes to ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing, conventional wisdom holds that G is the only part that really matters, as a window into overall management quality and providing insights and value for investors. Our analysis suggests this has not been true; that the E and S aspects of ESG did help sort the truly outstanding firms from a group that already shares an array of robust financial traits.

Previously, we have asked whether the number of women on boards has a relationship to corporate financial performance. Research suggests that it has. But is that the whole story?