ESG Archive

The EU Action Plan on sustainable investing should become critical to how investors value companies, according to Ben Constable-Maxwell, head of sustainable and impact investing at M&G Investments. Speaking at the ESG Integration Forum – Europe, hosted by IR Magazine and online sister publication Corporate Secretary, Constable-Maxwell said: ‘The action plan is going to be such a central driver of the integration of ESG and sustainability in the mark...

Almost half (46 percent) of investors surveyed by State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) believe considering ESG is part of their fiduciary duty, according to a new report from the asset manager. Rakhi Kumar, head of ESG investments and asset stewardship at SSGA, says investor perception of ESG as a fiduciary duty is a positive step, but presents challenges. ‘We’ve seen how ESG started from an SRI perspective,’ she says. ‘Now it’s going mainstream because itâ...

Industry professionals in the US foresee no turning around from the direction companies and investors have been headed in recent years, with a growing number of shareholder proposals in 2020 on issues under the ESG umbrella. In terms of which proposals end up in votes at AGMs, there is an expectation that the trend toward negotiating the withdrawal of many environmental and other disclosure-based proposals will continue, but also concern about a new SEC approach to decidin...

In evoking the backdrop of the French Revolution, Charles Dickens tells us in the opening sentence of A tale of two cities that it was ‘the best of times, it was the worst of times’. History, and the films and books that portray it, are often pushed to extremes, identifying good and bad as absolutes. But there are rarely true absolutes and transitioning is very rarely a one-step process. With the growing awareness and focus on ESG factors, this differen...