“At its core, ESG is a quest for something increasingly crucial in the battle to improve capitalism and to mitigate climate change: making firms and their owners accountable for their negative externalities, or the impact of production or consumption of their products on third parties, such as the atmosphere”
Source: Economist July 2022
At present there is general scepticism as measuring ESG is proving subjective and there is a sense that the corporate world over-promises and under-delivers.
Take recent events at Boo Hoo where poor employee conditions and poor treatment of suppliers were exposed and yet astonishingly they did not fix them and were exposed again.
The ESG rating industry needs to learn, progress, develop and collaborate – which is hard to do with your competitors.
A study of six of the significant ESG rating agencies discovered there were:
Like a Woolworths pick & mix to suit your corporate objectives.
Notwithstanding the above, my opinion is ESG does play an important role.
In 2006, I watched the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” by Al Gore, intended to educate people about global warming.
I feel embarrassed today, as at the time I did not believe the documentary because it was…well...inconceivable that this could happen to our world. There is now a general acceptance that unless we reverse the carbon producing impact of the past 50 years humankind is in trouble.
Socially, when it comes to race, gender, ability and pay, the corporate world is still an unjust place. The corporate world proves again and again that it cannot be trusted to hold itself to account – something we’ve all seen with Mr Bates v The Post Office and the surrounding public furor.
All of this is why, for the foreseeable future, myself and ABSTRACT will remain champions of ESG, despite its shortcomings. Although progress clearly needs to continue to be made by the ratings industry I encourage you, reader, to be an active ally.
Here are three actions you can take today within the corporate world:
1 – Be curious.
2 – Share knowledge.
3 – Understand your own companies' ESG status.
Could you or your team benefit from learning how to lead competent conversations around Sustainability?
Location
We are currently based in Edinburgh, York, London, Northern Ireland and operate throughout the UK, Ireland, Poland, USA, India, Hong Kong and Dubai.
