Amid the tumultuous events of the last 18 months, companies have come under pressure to discuss how they work in the interests of all stakeholders, not just shareholders. At the same time, investors are pushing companies to better explain how ...
ESG Archive
‘This is the biggest capital reallocation since the Industrial Revolution,’ said Nicholas Stern to the ...
With more than 16 years of corporate governance experience, serving on more than 20 public and private boards across Asia, I know that the more time directors spend on oversight and strategy – and the effectiveness of that output – the more these factors drive value creation, ultimately feeding back to the boards themselves.
To be successful at creating value, my experience has shown that boards must:
Spend an average of 20-30 days a year on board w...
Almost a quarter (23 percent) of Fortune 100 firms say board evaluation is now an ongoing process and something that happens beyond the formal annual evaluation, according to EY.
This is an increase from just 9 percent in 2018, EY notes, adding that this ‘real-time evaluation’ allows companies to be ‘timely and agile’ to address issues more quickly and avoid a deepening of problems, as well as allowing ‘continuous improvement’.
In addition to incr...
A series of measures have been announced by the IFRS Foundation Trustees (IFRSFT) to provide global financial markets with high-quality disclosures on climate and other sustainability issues.
Hot on the heels of climate change discussions at the COP26 summit in Glasgow, UK, the new developments lay the technical groundwork for a global sustainability disclosure standard-setter for the financial markets.
The announcement covers the introduction of three new me...
The UK government has announced its backing for a new review to monitor the representation of women in the upper rungs of FTSE companies and increase opportunities available to them.
The FTSE Women Leaders Review was revealed this week by the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy. The new five-year review is the successor to the government-backed Hampton Alexander review, which ran from 2015 to 2020 and was widely regarded as a success, seeing a 50 ...
Thirty-three environmental and social proposals won the backing of most voting shareholders this year, compared with 18 in 2020, according to analysis by Georgeson.
‘The results of the 2021 proxy season highlight the monumental change in investor focus toward ESG risks and opportunities, particularly climate change and workforce diversity,’ says Hannah Orowitz, Georgeson’s US head of ESG, in a statement.
More than a third – 13 out of 36 – of env...
ESG has risen to become a dominant issue over the last two years. This has been driven by many factors, including greater transparency, the growing demand for climate action, increasing regulation and the need for companies to demonstrate a clear license to operate. But there has ...
Nike shareholders have given indications of significant support for a number of social measures – although none secured a majority.
Four social-based shareholder proposals were up for a vote at Nike’s AGM last week. The board had urged shareholders to vote against each of them.
Of the four proposals, a request that Nike publish annual repor...
SEC commissioner Allison Herren Lee recently spoke about a paradigm shift with respect to ESG. In a June 2021 address at the Society for Corporate Governance national conference, she explained that ESG issues had traditionally been referred to as ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) issues, and treated as if they were separate from the business of generating revenue and earning profits....
