Refinitiv First to Track NGO Actions in New Era for CSR and Due Diligence
Refinitiv expands its due diligence offering with a real-time monitor of NGO campaigns; fines, class action suits and shareholder proxy votes, with a new business partnership with Sigwatch.
Risk management is taking on vast new parameters of environmental and social governance, as the importance of non-financial considerations takes centre stage with the EU’s announcement of a Green Deal, a projected $1trillion capital injection to fund more sustainable use of natural resources and energy over the next decade.
On 4 march 2020, the EC proposed the European Climate Law to turn the political commitment of climate-neutrality into a legal obligation, targeting a 50% decline in emissions by 2050. This will be done via a combination of agricultural and industrial subsidies promoting greener processes and production, and private sector loans to infrastructure investments.
It is projected that the European Investment Bank, which has recently stated it would be tapering loans to fossil fuel projects, will issue loan guarantees for higher-risk projects. A key tenet of the transition is promotion of the ‘circular economy’, a concept whereby natural resources are recycled back through the production stream; currently it is estimated that 1/3 of all resources end up as waste, whether as CO2 emisssions which could be recycled through carbon recapture, or plastics or fibres which end up rotting in landfills.
Over 200 governments and major companies are signed up to the World Economic Forum’s Facility for Accelerating the Circular Economy, which promotes more sustainable and auditable production processes, targeting KPIs with finance in some cases contingent on emissions staying below a certain level, for example. Business-as-units are projected to increase global solid waste by 70% up to 2050, so the need to tackle waste management is increasingly urgent.
Many environmental and social costs are off balance-sheet so they are not factored into a costing analysis or a cost-of-investment analysis making it difficult to assess Value for Money of even tangible assets. This information gap means new services have emerged to help private and institutional investors to plug the gap, such as Refinitiv’s new partner Sigwatch
Sigwatch conducts macro and micro analysis on ESG issues. It monitors on a daily basis how environmental, human and animal rights and consumer related NGOs are driving legislation and corporate action.
The company tracks over 10,000 NGO groups on over 1,000 issues worldwide. Between 30–40 new campaigns are daily reported and added to its database of over 80,000 campaign actions.
