ESG engagement
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‘Good disclosure does not replace good strategy’: Author and IR Impact Awards judge Nana Li on navigating ESG in Asia
From investor expectations to how companies should be talking ESG, Nana Li is all about sustainability. The author recently released her book titled Navigating sustainability in Asia: A practical guide for leaders and investors and has joined the judging panel for the IR Impact Awards – Greater China. In her day job, Li is head of sustainability and stewardship for Asia Pacific at London-headquartered Impax Asset Management, where she plays a key role in engagement, strategy and policy conversations between investee companies at the $29.5 bn manager. We talk to Li – while wearing her writing hat, speaking independently from…
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The sustainability Taliban, the eco right and why we need a new language for ESG: down the rabbit hole with Robert Eccles
When Robert Eccles wrote a piece called Grift capitalism: The GOP’s brilliant strategy for ripping off ordinary Americans, it received the usual dose of online hate mail. It also led to a challenge: if you can find a conservative that thinks sustainability is good for capital markets, will you stop ‘writing nasty stuff’ about Republicans? That led him to the position he speaks from today: a liberal ex-hippy who has found common ground with the so-called ‘eco right’. Eccles, a well-known author and lecturer who has been writing about non-financial metrics since the early 1970s, had already become frustrated with…
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Talking DEI under Trump 2.0: how anti-woke investors are hijacking pro-ESG proposals
What does DEI mean to you? Here at IR Impact, we’ve stopped spelling out diversity, equity and inclusion, working under the assumption that this most tricky of news items is known to all. But it seems that other interpretations exist – on the White House official X account for example, where a post was recently put out stating ‘the only DEI we support is Deport Every Illegal’. That very much sums up the kind of narrative companies are up against with today’s very public broadly anti-ESG and specifically anti-DEI rhetoric.
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‘Driving sustainability means changing organizational culture’: Aecon’s Prabh Banga on the challenges of ESG
Ahead of our upcoming IR Impact Forum – Canada, set to be held in Toronto on April 3, we have caught up with some of the event’s leading speakers to understand their outlook for investor communications in Canada.
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‘What we don’t need is more masculine energy’: Where ESG fits in the corporate scandal warning system
What links Wells Fargo, the largest retail bank in the US with Boeing or failed blood-analysis startup Theranos? They all offer up examples of corporate scandal that feature in Guido Palazzo’s book The Dark Pattern: The hidden dynamics of corporate scandal, co-authored with Ulrich Hoffrage. In it, Palazzo, a professor of business ethics and TEDx Talk speaker, and Hoffrage, a professor of decision theory, seek to uncover what lands huge multinational firms with multi-million-dollar fines for fraud, their senior executives at best fired or at worst jailed.
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Meta and other companies’ pushback against DEI is a gutless move
All eyes are currently on Washington DC ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration. Business leaders of the world – and particularly in the US – are lining up to curry favor with the returning US leader after Elon Musk became a part of the president-elect’s inner circle.
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Can sustainable divesting pressure companies to improve their environmental profiles?
Academic Dr George Skiadopoulos presents the latest research into how investors sway companies Do institutional investors take into account firms’ climate exposures in setting up stock portfolios? And, if they do, what are the effects on the cost of equity of the firms they are investing in (or divesting from) and the resulting effects on the firms’ future environmental profiles? A common narrative in climate finance is that if an investor cares about the climate and a company is negatively contributing to the environment, then the investor will ‘punish’ the company by underweighting the stock in their portfolio. As a…
