ESG News in Brief (5/12/2022 - 11/12/2022)

  Briefing

The plan is expected to double earnings and cash flow potential by 2027 versus 2019 and supports the company’s strategic priorities, which include leading the industry in safety, shareholder returns, earnings and cash flow growth; cost and capital efficiency; and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions intensity.

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DUBAI, Dec 5 (Reuters) - Emirati retail conglomerate Majid Al Futtaim said on Monday it had raised a $1.25 billion revolving credit facility linked to the company's environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals.

He Jie, Director of the Shenzhen Local Financial Supervision and Administration Bureau - Shaping a Resilient Society with Flexible Power

The topic I am sharing today is "Shaping a Resilient Society with Flexible Power", including the corporate governance that everyone discussed this morning is also a kind of flexible power-it is not hard and external, but more soft and internalized. Heart, imperceptible, need a long time to work. Today's sharing is divided into two parts. The first part talks about flexible power and resilient society, and the second part talks about Shenzhen's practice. Kun also represents women, and the power of flexibility can also be seen from this perspective. On October 20 this year, the UN Security Council held an open debate, emphasizing the need to continue promoting gender equality to ensure sustainable development. Resilience is a very popular word after the epidemic. Resilient cities, resilient economies, and resilient societies are all our goals. Diversity in the narrow sense of the board is mainly related to gender, and it is advocated to increase the proportion of women. In the 14th Five-Year Plan of Shenzhen’s financial industry, it is also proposed to build a sustainable financial center, which is to explore around environmental and social issues. Every year, there are many best practices in the financial innovation awards of the municipal government, and we are also showing them to the world. One of the recognized roles is to be able to avoid financial crisis, so it is suitable for the role of supervisor. At the same time, 80% of the purchasing behavior of a family is dominated by women, and many industries must have women.

On November 26, 2022, at the 2022 Shanghai International Financial Center Development Forum, the "Shanghai Green Finance Index" jointly compiled by the People's Bank of China and the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance of Shanghai Jiao Tong University was officially released. MioTech provided technology for the index compilation support. Green finance indices generally have the main characteristics of being "targeted, unique, single-method, and propaganda-oriented", which can easily lead to consequences such as lack of comparability, limited application scenarios, and lack of rigorous methodology. In view of the challenges generally faced by the green finance index, the Shanghai Green Finance Index has formulated three major goals of vertical comparison, cross-validation and horizontal comparison, and flexibly uses the three "magic weapons" of "scope, measurement, and weight" to design the index to achieve the goal. The Shanghai Green Finance Index aims to reflect the overall performance of green finance in Shanghai. It is creatively based on an evaluation framework and two sets of methods, and simultaneously compiles two indexes: the Shanghai Green Finance Current Performance Index and the Shanghai Green Finance Social Awareness Index. Among them, the current performance index uses actual data to show the performance of Shanghai's green finance, and the social awareness index uses questionnaires to reflect the public's views on Shanghai's green finance.

WTW - Willis Towers Watson logoIn WTW’s 2022 ESG Global Risk Managers Survey, which includes 312 corporate risk managers worldwide, one-third said ESG currently influences risk management strategy, and an additional 9% said it is set to do so during the next two years. However, only 35% of North American risk managers, and fewer in other regions, expect to have documented ESG risk management targets and milestones within two years. Lisa Lipuma, Director of Enterprise Risk Consulting, North America, WTW, commented, “Many organisations equate ESG risk with reputational risk, but to manage ESG effectively it must be broken down into measured, manageable risks, and a risk management process established around them.

Deloitte Report: 99% of Public Companies Expect to Invest in ESG Reporting and Tech by Next Year

To address disclosure readiness, 89% of executives surveyed say they enhanced internal goal setting and accountability mechanisms, and 81% report creating new roles and responsibilities to prepare for additional disclosure requirements. As reported in the previous ESG executive survey, this a notable increase from last year when only 21% of a similar profile of survey respondents reported implementing a cross-functional ESG working group. Deloitte’s “Sustainability action report: Survey findings on ESG disclosure and preparedness” shares executive insights about increased preparations, challenges, and planned investments being made to meet the growing expectation for high-quality sustainability reporting information. Moving from commitment to action Rather than waiting to react to disclosure requirements, companies are taking steps now to accelerate their sustainability journeys by proactively implementing changes to accelerate readiness and are pivoting to anticipate the strategic business benefits of integrating sustainability into business strategy.

Companies are internally shifting focus to prioritize ESG oversight, controls, and disclosure to prepare for increasing demand for high quality sustainability disclosures.

Pharma and ESG – The Patient Perspective

55% of patient groups responding to a 2021 survey stated that they “Did not know” about pharma’s ESG activities (a decrease from the 61% of respondent patient groups stating the same in the 2020 survey). Many of these patient groups feel that pharma companies could do much more to communicate their ESG strategies to patient groups.