Tag Archives: CSR
We come across a lot of sustainability reports in our daily work here at Framework:CR. As the majority of reporting companies now use the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Sustainability Reporting Guidelines, I’ll usually flip to the GRI Index or the “About this Report” section to get a quick read on what I might expect to find.
What continues to puzzle me is why a good percentage of companies that use the GRI fail to declare an Application Level. (An Application Level is a GRI-defined A/B/C ranking that indicates to what degree a company has used the Reporting Guidelines).
What is even more confusing is when a company goes to the trouble of providing a full GRI Index, includes sufficient disclosures for an A or B Application Level… and STILL doesn’t declare. For example, can you find an Application Level declaration in … More
I attended the NYSSA-SIF conference on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing at Bloomberg’s beautiful offices on Tuesday morning, accompanied by about 150 people (maybe more), mainly investors and analysts. The debate over whether funds that consider ESG factors generate alpha was still surprisingly strong: the panel of academics was split, while the practitioners who spoke maintained that there is significant value in ESG-based analysis.* Threaded throughout was the sentiment expressed by several in the room: we need more data.
To be fair, there is far more publicly available ESG data than there was only a few years ago. Despite the growth in the number of ESG data providers over the past few years, however, much of the data supplied is not normalized and so makes for difficult comparisons across sectors and across companies within a given sector. To be useful, remarked Curtis Ravenel, Global Head,… More
