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“Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors can matter.”
Principles for Responsible Investment |
The investor community has been undergoing a rapid awakening to the importance of environmental and social factors to investment decision making. This has transformed the investor landscape. Institutions with over $10 trillion in Assets under Management (AUM) have signed the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) signifying that sustainability has become a mainstream, fiduciary concern. The brokerage research industry has begun to develop specialized research capabilities and the Enhanced Analytics Initiative has stimulated the growth of hundreds of reports. This need to analyze ESG leads to the demand for better information on corporate sustainability performance.
Are investors finding the information they need?
The investor community represents one of the key stakeholder groups for sustainability reporting. GRI has an essential role to play in ensuring that there is consistent, material, and reliable information on sustainability performance available to the financial markets. Without standardized information, investors and the financial markets will be unable to integrate environmental and social factors into their decision-making.
However, presently the sustainability performance information provided by companies is not sufficient for investors to incorporate it satisfactorily into their decision making process.
How is GRI addressing these issues?
GRI has been working with the investor community since its inception and is currently working with investors in several areas:
- Establishing an Investor Consultation Group to develop guidance on how sustainability reports can be most useful for investors;
- Researching trends in how investors use ESG information;
- Making communication of ESG information to investors and research agencies more efficient through XBRL;
- Working with investor initiatives to further promote the use of sustainability information.
What is XBRL?
XBRL offers a way to put an electronic “tag” on numbers or other qualitative information in the report. That way, computers can recognize the information select it, analyze it, store it, exchange it with other computers and present it automatically in different ways. Find out much more about XBRL here.
Download the G3 Guidelines XBRL Taxonomy here.
What next?
This page will be updated over time as GRI’s investor initiatives evolve. For more information relavent to the investor community visit the Who Are You? Investor section of the GRI Portal.
For more information about GRI’s activities related to financial markets, contact Sean Gilbert.
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