ESG

ESG as a leading framework for Corporate Social Responsibility

ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria. It is a set of financial and non-financial performance metrics increasingly adopted by investors as a means to evaluate a company’s material risk, resilience, and capacity for sustainable value-creation in the long-term. As green business practice becomes increasingly important for companies, investors, and stakeholders alike, the ESG framework is evolving into a central pillar of Corporate Social Responsibility.

Businesses can get ahead by being proactive about transparency with regards to ESG issues.  Whether it’d be through specific ESG reporting initiatives such as responding to GRESB or CDP, creating and updating a GRI content matrix, or writing an annual ESG report, Sustainable Investment Group (SIG) is equipped to assist you in your company’s ESG reporting needs.

ESG Services

Our ESG services include annual ESG reporting, as well as responses to various standardized ESG performance indicators. The standardized ESG performance indicators are often incorporated into annual ESG reports, but we offer standalone reporting in both services areas.  Ultimately, our goal is to utilize our green building expertise to support your company’s strategy, performance, and communication within an ESG framework.

Annual ESG Reporting

Annual ESG reporting is one of the many ways through which companies can be transparent by comprehensively communicating their sustainable business strategies and practices to stakeholders. Although voluntary, it has become an increasingly important dimension of annual reporting insofar as annual ESG reporting demonstrates how sustainability is integrated within a company’s corporate policy. As sustainability becomes a value that cannot be overlooked by the investment community, annual ESG reporting is becoming pivotal within the investment screening process.

Our team of green building experts is equipped to help your business craft a robust annual ESG report that best illustrates your efforts and impacts within ESG’s three key dimensions. Through our collaborative and engaged approach, we can help you communicate what is important to your company, how your ESG commitments reflect your values and mission, and how they positively impact the world.

ESG Performance Indicators

ESG performance indicators standardize and quantify environmental costs and benefits across portfolios. These performance metrics involve the assessment of both financial and non-financial dimensions in order to measure a company’s performance with regards to environmental, social, and governance criteria. SIG’s expertise in ESG includes reporting within the following survey frameworks:
Non-scored frameworks:

• GRI: The Global Reporting Initiative is one of the most well-known and popular reporting indices in the world. A nonprofit fully launched in 2000, the GRI assesses businesses, governments, and organizations’ impacts on matters pertaining to climate change, human rights, and corruption, among other factors. Our GRI reporting service involves working with your team to create a GRI reporting format, establishing the disclosures of interest, and calculating water, energy, and GHG emissions of your portfolio(s).

• SASB: The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, a non-profit founded in 2011, endeavors to establish sustainability accounting standards across companies and organizations. SASB is unique in that it has an industry specific focus on financially-material information. Our SASB reporting service assists companies in writing a report that identifies the subset of ESG issues most relevant to financial performance, offers a breakdown of accounting metrics related to the corresponding environmental dimensions, and includes a discussion and analysis of each dimension.

• TCDF: The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures was created in 2015 and evaluates the financial impact of climate change of a company or organization. As such, the TCDF framework enables companies to assess climate-related risks – including where companies should allocate funds and future planning – while also encouraging transparency to stakeholders. Our TCDF reporting service assists in identifying the exposure to and oversight of climate change risks within your organization.

Scored frameworks:

• GRESB: The Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark is one of the most critical ESG performance indicators used by investors and industry actors in the corporate real estate sector. GRESB assesses and benchmarks ESG performance of real estate portfolios and assets, providing standardized and validated data to the market. Our GRESB reporting service offers continual support for our clients from the pre-reporting period in April until final results are released in October.  We meet with your team at every step of the way to evaluate policies and draft responses that are aligned with your company’s strategy and GRESB’s performance metrics.

• CDP: The Carbon Disclosure Project is the most widely responded to ESG performance metric survey. Whereas GRESB puts a larger emphasis on the real estate sector specifically, the CDP focuses primarily on broader metrics of GHG emissions and climate change risk. Our CDP reporting service assists clients in identifying climate change risks and their financial impacts, and also helps calculate the emissions of your portfolio(s).  We evaluate and dissect sustainability policies, communicating with our clients throughout the CDP reporting window to ensure that your strategies are well translated into the language of CDP performance metrics.