California....Water: The place name and the liquid substance are interconnected in the minds of sustaianbility professionals thinking about climate change and the effects that we are already seeing in the American landscape.
The chronic drought in the Golden State has brought the water shortage issue in sharp relief, especially since California is for many crops the "breadbasket" of America, and sufficient water for irrigation and food processing is a critical need.
"Operating under the radar" -- that is, various categories of institutional investors getting active in the "investor activist" game? Bruce Goldfarb, CEO of Okapi Partners, describes a sea change that he sees that is underway, the trend in how large institutions are approaching in the [investor] push for corporate change. The lens is the annual corporate proxy season and the many campaigns therein, including the 2017 campaign. Okapi is one of the influential proxy advisors for both investor and companies, working on some 48 campaigns during 2017.
The S&P 500 (R) universe of large-cap companies is the most widely used gauge for investors of large-cap U.S. corporate entities. There is more than US$7 trillion investments benchmarked to the S&P 500, with index assets of almost $2 trillion represented. The index captures more than 80 percent of available market capitalization, notes owner S&P Dow Jones Indexes / McGraw Hill Financial.
We've been sharing news and perspectives on recent developments in l'affaires climate change, with the US government [at the Federal level] abandoning the landmark Paris Agreement (the COP 21 accomplishments, with almost 200 nations participating).
All eyes were on Hamburg, Germany last week as the leaders of the "G20" nations** gathered. High on the agenda was climate change and sustainable development. Mixed messages came out of the gathering, but as Jens-Peter Saul explains in our first Top story, even if governments can't agree in such gatherings, private industry is moving forward in providing climate change solutions.
The GRI framework for corporate, institutional and organizational sustainability reporting has been in place since 1999-2000. Since those early days (when a handful of organizations published sustainability reports), the framework has been through four iterations ("G1" to "G4") and in October 2016 GRI launched the world's first global standards for sustainability reporting. More than 40,000 reports are now in the GRI Sustainability Disclosure Database (database.globalreporting.org). GRI is headquartered in Amsterdam, The
As the President of the United States began the laborious process of reneging on the historic global agreement to address the challenges of climate change reached in Paris at the COP 21 meetings in 2015, the reaction inside the country by thought leaders and important economic players was swift and decisive: The "We Are Still In" movement was launched by private parties and state and municipal-level government officials.
The good news is that more public company managements are involved in, and approving, broader disclosure on sustainability information. There are widely-accepted frameworks in place to help boards and managements better understand the needs and desires of stakeholders -- especially providers of capital (asset owners, managers, analysts) seeking meaningful data and accompanying narrative to explain the progress being made (or lack thereof) in ESG performance.
"Resolute!" - The root of the word comes down to us from the ancient Latin, meaning (over many centuries) to decide on and stay with a course of action. We're seeing that these days in the "resolve" of the US corporate community, in the resolute actions of many cities and municipalities, in the actions of a growing number of US states, and among institutional investors of all types, shapes and forms.
Everyone in the investing world and the corporate suite knows of the importance of the S&P 500 Index®; it's the intellectual property of the S&P Dow Jones Indices unit of S&P Global and is the widely used benchmark by which asset managers track their performance (against the index performance).
