SustainabilityHQ.com Weekly Highlights

Seems like just yesterday we were celebrating the great promise of the 21st Century – the Paris Accord. Can you believe, it is now five years on (260 weeks or so this December) since the meeting in the “City of Lights” of the Conference of Parties.

Looking back 90+ years to the 1920s, corporate financial disclosure was in essence, a joke. (Why, said one public company leadership, would we ever tell investors what our real financial condition is!)

Before the disastrous October 1929 stock market crash, there was little in the way of disclosure and reporting requirements for companies with public stockholders.

Every two years, since 1996, the influential trade organization for sustainable, responsible and impact investment (US SIF) conducts a year-long survey of professional asset managers to determine the total of USA-based assets under management

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.