Reporting & ESG

Amid the debate on what companies should or shouldn’t be doing on ESG, some things remain crystal clear: understanding and addressing business externalities is essential, and issues that affect the bottom line cannot be ignored. Deforestation is one of these. Investors and IR professionals are concerned about climate change, and increasingly about nature loss. More […]

In 2021, three quarters of IR Magazine cover stories focused on ESG. We looked at how companies were increasingly tying executive compensation to ESG, explored the ways in which ESG was being integrated into sell-side research and examined how ESG was shaping corporate reporting. Of course, IR Magazine has long covered ESG issues – just […]

Blue-chip companies spend big bucks on social programs. Apple, for example, recently increased its budget for its diversity program alone from $100 mn to $200 mn, while Mercedes Group spent €97 mn ($104 mn) on training in 2023, up from €93 mn the year before. The areas normally included under the S pillar of ESG are […]

Recently, the head of ESG at a blue-chip asset manager that is paying more than $200,000 annually for ESG data told me: ‘Once we get this ton of data from a major data provider, our work just begins. We have to make some financial sense of it.’ His remark points to a fundamental problem with […]

In the dynamic landscape of financial decision-making, the importance of non-financial objectives – encapsulated in ESG criteria – has become central for governments, corporations and investors. Even as recent forecasts project a significant increase in ESG-related assets under management, concerns about the potential impact on returns persist. That has significant implications for IR professionals, who […]