ESGTree, a leading environmental, social, governance (ESG) software platform for private capital investors, and Together|Ensemble (TE), Canada’s national conference to track progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), are partnering to host Sustainable Finance Experts at this year’s conference in Waterloo, Ontario.
Author: ESGTree
The CSRD targets financial and non-financial companies covered by the Accounting Directive and the Transparency Directive, and falling into the following categories:
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is poised to release its highly anticipated climate-related disclosure rules for public US companies – a ruling that has been in the making for over a year.
Originally published in March 2022, the SEC proposed that all publicly listed US companies be mandated to report their climate data in alignment with reporting recommendations from the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD).
When the proposal was then opened for public comment, the SEC received over 3,400 letters, significantly more than it customarily does when seeking public input.
While the SEC ruling applies to public companies, given the current global regulatory environment, along with calls for greater scrutiny of ESG claims within the private equity industry, it is only a matter of time before similar climate considerations be asked of private funds. Moreover, although the proposal will almost certainly face some measure of legal challenges, this will likely not deter 98% of companies from implementing climate reporting, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of 300 senior executives at US public companies with at least $500 million in revenues
The Regulatory Rise of TCFD Reporting
The United Kingdom now mandates TCFD-aligned reporting requirements for the private sector. The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed requiring publicly traded US companies
Climate risk is now recognized as financial risk — and rightly so. Understanding climate risk, as well as climate opportunities, is a paramount concern for investors, regulators, and indeed, all economies striving towards sustainable business models and net-zero futures. This is why ESGTree has published a comprehensive guide for financial institutions to stay ahead of the game: Decoding Climate Disclosures for Financial Institutions. In this guide, we break down and simplify the much anticipated climate reporting proposals by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) and the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG).
While the ESG regulatory landscape is evolving and complex, ESGTree is with you every step of the way. Between our Carbon Calculator, streamlined data collection platform, automated ESG reports, and benchmarking capabilities, we believe the climate challenge is really an opportunity for business excellence.
Join the sustainable finance revolution. Join ESGTree.
We recently had an insightful conversation with Tanya Carmichael, ESGTree’s Advisory Board Member, ex-Head of Global Funds Private Capital at Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan (OTPP) and ex-Chair of the Institutional Limited Partners Association (ILPA). In our candid talk below, Tanya shares her thoughts about ESG integration, reporting and how LPs can prevent GPs from drowning in due diligence questionnaires (DDQs).
ESGTree – one of the first platforms globally to automate EDCI data submission – is now collaborating with the ESG Data Convergence Initiative (EDCI) on inbound data submission. By integrating directly with the EDCI data portal, ESGTree can further streamline data submission & validation to the EDCI for ESGTree clients.
Our fully integrated SFDR Reporting Software addresses these challenges by:1)Translating legislation & technical indicators into an intuitive interface that enables portfolio companies to track & improve their performance.
On 26th June, 2023, the ISSB finally launched its inaugural sustainability standards, ushering in a new era in international corporate reporting.The International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) has issued its first two IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards: the IFRS S1, which provides a set of general disclosure requirements designed to enable companies to communicate to investors about the sustainability-related risks and opportunities they face over the short, medium and long term, and the IFRS S2 , which sets out specific climate-related disclosures and is designed to be used with IFRS S1. Both standards fully incorporate the 4 pillars of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), namely Governance, Strategy, Risk Management, and Metrics and Targets.
Interestingly, the TCFD – which has been adopted into UK law and is used voluntarily by many of the world’s biggest asset managers – has now moved into the administration of the ISSB. This merger, as well as the ISSB’s subsumption of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), marks a significant advancement in the ISSB’s promise of bringing cohesion among the plethora of sustainability standards and frameworks available for asset managers.
Last year, private equity firm the Carlyle Group and pension fund the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) announced what could become a game changer for the private equity industry. The ESG Data Convergence Initiative, or EDCI, seeks to standardize ESG reporting for general partners (GPs) by creating a single framework for them to follow. The aim is to generate a critical mass of comparable information on how GPs’ portfolio companies are performing on ESG relative to each other, as well as to promote greater reporting transparency for limited partners (LPs). The data will be aggregated into an anonymized benchmark by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
Thus far, 59 leading LPs and 121 GPs have agreed to participate in the project, or perhaps what at this point one can termed an experiment, that together represent over $8 trillion in assets under management.