Around the globe, a third of all professionally managed assets, or roughly $30 trillion, are now subject to ESG criteria. That’s a remarkable sum, one that represents an increase of more than 30% since 2016. Between April and June of 2020 alone, investors poured more than $70 billion into ESG equity funds, vastly exceeding recent annual flows.
ESG Impact Is Hard to Measure — But It’s Not Impossible
Three ways to capture the data that matters.
January 22, 2021
Summary.
ESG measurement is an increasingly popular way of holding companies accountable when it comes to sustainability efforts, and of giving companies an incentive to improve them. But measurement, no matter how sophisticated, is much better at capturing easily quantifiable inputs than complex and messy outcomes and impacts. Companies need to do everything they can to understand those outcomes and impacts — and that requires doing more than just measurement. In particular, companies need to do three things: (1) zoom in to develop insights on processes, (2) zoom out to see broader systems, and (3) value curiosity and learning.
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Excel in a world that's being continually transformed by technology.