SustainabilityHQ.com Weekly Highlights

Indexes – Indices - Benchmarks – these are very important analysis and portfolio management tools for asset owners and their internal and external managers. We can think of them as a sort of report card; fiduciaries can track their performance against the funds they manage; financial sector players can develop products for investment (mutual funds, Exchange Traded Funds, separate accounts and so on) to market to investors.

The United Nations projection is for today’s global population of an estimated 7.6 billion people to expand to a global population of 8.6B by 2030 and 9.8B by 2050...and then to 11.2 billion in 2100

The United Nations members states -- the global family of sovereign nations collaborating peacefully for seven-plus decades to address common challenges -- got good news on its 75th anniversary.

Welcome to Highlights issue #500 – a landmark, we will say, in this, the tenth anniversary year of publishing the G&A Institute’s weekly newsletter.

As readers of Highlights know, the shift from “stockholder” to “stakeholder” capitalism has been underway in earnest for a good while now and the public dialogue about this “21st Century Sign of Progress” has been quite lively.

There is so much going on in the global sustainability space that we could draw an apt analogy – it’s “like drinking water not out of a straw but a fire hose!”

There are lively discussions going on, centered on improving publicly-traded company disclosure and reporting – and especially ESG reporting…that is, storytelling about the company’s “non-financials” (in accounting-speak).

This has been a strange summer in the northern climes, as the corporate sector and capital markets players meet the challenges of the corona virus, economic downturn, and civil protests.

The roots of today’s “sustainable investing” approaches go back decades; the organizing principle often was often around what investors viewed as “socially responsible”, “ethical”, “faith-based” and “values” investing.