One of the major news-brewing pieces in the financial circle came in summer 2023, when Larry Fink-CEO of the US-based financial corporation BlackRock-stated the firm handles more than $9 trillion in assets and declared it would substitute the word “ESG” for its investment strategies based on Environmental, Social, and Governance. The change marked an important moment for the business world, where BlackRock has been regarded as a leader in corporate and investment strategy adjustments for decades.
ESG: From CSR to Mainstream Business Strategy
ESG traces its origins back to corporate social responsibility and socially responsible investing, both of which date back decades and have guided corporate actions. In the early days, ESG was driven by a need for corporate accountability: Investors were crying for companies to change and become more responsible. Avoiding businesses whose practices caused undesirable social and environmental impacts was one way of responding constructively to such issues-an approach that fosters positive social and environmental practices.
In response, most businesses began to include ESG factors such as carbon emissions, governance practice, or even product safety within operations. ESG ratings and due diligence gradually became part of investment processes while financial institutions transformed to combine the requirements of responsible businesses by investors with companies seeking ways to improve their respective ESG metrics.
The ESG movement became a huge push in the early 2000s, and special impetus came afterward when the United Nations published its 2004 report titled “Who Cares Wins.” Indeed, the report highlighted the fact that this management of ESG factors could indeed improve competitiveness and thus lead to better financial performance. That was the watershed moment for ESG; from then on, more companies of all sizes started working with their strategic corporations in alignment toward sustainability goals.
A Complicated Landscape
But greater popularity has brought greater complexity. In the course of its advance, ESG blurring with impact investing has created opportunities for much confusion. Impact investing focused largely on funding projects likely to have positive social value in some respects and was willing to take lower returns for that reason, whereas ESG strategies, at least up until now, have been generally more intent on maximizing profit. This blurring of lines results in confusion and criticism across many areas, but particularly within the United States, as groups criticize ESG as being a means of “woke” investing.
The conversation around ESG is taking the direction of materiality these days. The goal is to develop clear, measurable standards relating to how environmental and social factors will affect financial performance. One example is the U.S. They have to disclose how climate change affects their financial prospects as SEC rules mandate them to do so. The idea of “double materiality” opens an avenue for encouraging businesses to think about how their actions affect not only their books but also the greater good.
Arguments and Challenges
This concept of considering financial and social measures has made it tough to standardize ESG in reality. The term is so loose that it often includes strategies that may not align exactly with financial goals. It has led to the ambiguity where through such loose definitions, ESG has been criticized for weak metrics and as a result, some companies manipulate reporting standards to avoid accountability.
All that said, however, there is a general agreement that ESG is not going to go away. The expectations for companies to attend to the demands of stakeholders and comply with new frameworks of regulation will continue unabated. For instance, the European Union has adopted the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, requiring companies to track and report simple ESG metrics. Moreover, societal expectations from businesses to tackle growing environmental and social issues are likely to keep ESG-related issues on the front page.
The future of ESG: focusing on materiality and measurable standards.
An emerging best practice for businesses is to separate the ESG into environment, social, and governance-specific issues. For example, information about the environment, such as the tracking of greenhouse gas emissions, have been aggregated and therefore are more easily quantifiable. That created the opportunity for so-called “transition investing,” when companies invest in technologies that could cut greenhouse gas emissions and make a climate-resilient economy possible.
Such social matters are much tougher to quantify and have also become a source of cultural and political debate. Diversity and inclusion, worker safety, and community impact, among others, are highly nuanced in terms of how they are perceived and addressed. The U.S. Supreme Court only recently issued an affirmative action decision that has left many open questions on how businesses should move ahead with their diversity-related initiatives.
ESG at a Crossroads: What’s Next?
As ESG reaches a crossroads, some of its gurus write comparisons of how CSR and SRI went earlier in trying to find a balancing act between corporate social responsibility and the sure route toward profitability. After all, despite a popularity cycle, their broad scope, and lack of standardization make it vulnerable to pretty unflattering criticism. Companies now need to rethink strategies and adopt a more targeted approach toward sustainability.
A two-pronged ESG approach will be necessary to be put in place by company leadership. They will have to determine first the sustainability issues facing their financials and develop strategies that would mitigate the issues. They will be required to establish their risks and opportunities created by environmental and social factors that affect competitiveness. On the other side, companies must also consider adverse societal impacts and work on mitigation through collaboration with stakeholders and policy advocacy.
Whether “peak ESG” has been achieved is too early to tell; however, it is clear that those companies that are able to reconcile both objectives—financial materiality and societal impact—will likely be the leaders in making sense of an increasingly complex relationship between business and social expectations in the years to come.
Source: Harvard Business Review