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Sustainable Investing
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The views expressed are those of the author at the time of writing. Other teams may hold different views and make different investment decisions. The value of your investment may become worth more or less than at the time of original investment. While any third-party data used is considered reliable, its accuracy is not guaranteed. For professional, institutional, or accredited investors only.
This week, the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) organization published the first two Sustainability Disclosure Standards. Developed by the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), the new standards provide a comprehensive global baseline centered on financial materiality. The focus on financial materiality addresses a critical issue: the need for market participants to accurately assess the enterprise value of individual companies with information on sustainability topics most relevant to financial outcomes, industry by industry.
Accurate, comparable information about corporate enterprise value is essential to our ability to make informed investment decisions on behalf of our clients. For too long, investors have lacked the data necessary to price sustainability-related risks and opportunities, which can feed directly into the assessment of enterprise value. Without this information, investors run the risk of paying too high or low a price for an issuer’s securities. The ISSB’s efforts to standardize sustainability-related financial disclosures should improve data quality and enable national securities regulators and industry groups to adopt and support internationally comparable reporting.
Some Wellington investment teams have already seen the value of these disclosures, where they are available. For example, climate-related information has been a key input to several recent investment recommendations:
Establishing a baseline for sustainability disclosures will also help companies, which currently face a barrage of demands for reporting amid a fragmented, complex, and confusing landscape of disclosure expectations. By homing in on the issues most pertinent to investors, the new ISSB standards should provide clarity for companies and allow them to disclose material information with greater efficiency and accuracy. The interoperability of the ISSB standards with others, including the anticipated climate-disclosure framework from the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), should reinforce the role of the ISSB standards as the global baseline for sustainability disclosure for capital markets.
We encourage companies to adopt these standards voluntarily, even if their securities market regulators do not yet require them. While meeting these disclosure expectations will require reporting entities to deepen their knowledge of the sustainability topics most material to their business, we believe greater transparency will have significant long-term benefits for financial markets, including for the issuers of securities themselves, investors, and the millions of beneficiaries who rely on them.
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2022 Climate Report
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2022 Climate Report
Multiple authors
2022 Sustainability Report
We appreciate the opportunity to share our approach to advancing sustainable practices across our investment, client, and infrastructure platforms.
The state of climate investing: Asset owner perspectives
Discover what we learned from our 2022 global study on asset owners' interest and engagement around climate investing.
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We periodically update our guidelines in an ongoing effort to help Wellington's investment teams vote proxies in our clients' best interests. Read about key updates for this year from two members of Wellington's ESG team.
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The need for systemic climate change resilience is becoming clear. We present a practical framework to help companies enhance resilience in their own operations.
Multiple authors
Biodiversity: Why investors should take note
With scientists now broadly agreeing on the risks posed by accelerating biodiversity loss, Chris Goolgasian and Jenny Xie assess implications for investors and steps they can take.
Multiple authors
Impact measurement and management: addressing key challenges
Our IMM practice leader describes common impact investing challenges and suggests ways to overcome them.
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Multiple authors
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