Category: ESG

Advisor Teneo surveys 2021 sustainability reports

While the global powers are occupied at the COP26 climate summit with negotiating and pledging (or, is it more “blah, blah, blah,” as teenage activist Greta Thunberg contends in some, uh, straight talk?), and we await the SEC’s expected climate disclosure framework, it might be worthwhile to get a handle on what companies are doing about sustainability reporting in the meantime.  To help companies understand the current state of the art, CEO advisory firm Teneo surveyed 200 sustainability reports from S&P 500 companies in eleven industries published in the period between January 1 to June 30, 2021.  Teneo’s report, The-State-of-U.S.-Sustainability-Reporting, provides useful samples, market statistics for various aspects of the content and design of these reports, as well as some practical considerations.

Financial Stability Oversight Council reports on climate-related financial risk

Recently, when asked about how all of the U.S. agencies coordinate on climate issues, SEC Commissioner Allison Herren Lee observed that one way agencies coordinate is through the Financial Stability Oversight Council.   The FSOC, which is chaired by U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and includes SEC Chair Gary Gensler as a member, has just issued a new report on climate-related financial risk. The report concludes that climate-related financial risk is “an emerging threat to the financial stability of the United States.” Some of the discussions and recommendations in the report are remarkably congruent with recent comments from Gensler about expected SEC climate disclosure regulation. Are we starting to get an idea of what to expect?

The Conference Board reports on board diversity

The Conference Board has just released a new report, Corporate Board Practices in the Russell 3000, S&P 500, and S&P MidCap 400: 2021 Edition, a primary focus of which is board diversity. According to the press release, the study is the “most current and comprehensive review of board composition, director demographics, and governance practices at US public companies.”  Key to the study is that more companies are now actually disclosing the racial and ethnic composition of their boards (based on self-reporting by directors): companies providing data are up from 24% of the S&P 500 in 2020 to 59% in 2021, and from 7.7% of the Russell 3000 in 2020 to 26.9% in 2021. With regard to progress in board diversity, the data shows that women have made significant advances—on the Russell 3000 this year, women represented about 38% of this year’s newly elected class of directors, bringing total representation of women on Russell 3000 boards to 24.4%, up from 21.9% in 2020.  However, boards have significant catching up to do when it comes to racial and ethnic diversity. Based on self-reported data, “boards remain overwhelmingly white,” and, for 2021, the class of new directors was 78.3% white, with only 11.5% African-American, 6.5% Latinx/Hispanic and 3.1% Asian, Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.

Investors urge governments to act on climate, including risk disclosure

A group of 587 institutional investors managing over $46 trillion in assets have signed a new statement calling on governments to undertake five priority actions to accelerate climate investment before COP26, the 26th United Nations Climate Conference in Glasgow in November.   The statement, the 2021 Global Investor Statement to Governments on the Climate Crisis, was coordinated by The Investor Agenda, a group founded by Asia Investor Group on Climate Change, CDP, Ceres, Investor Group on Climate Change, Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, Principles for Responsible Investment and UNEP Finance Initiative.  According to the Agenda, the statement comes after “a month which brought more catastrophic weather events around the world, and the alarming predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that without immediate, rapid and large-scale emissions reductions, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will be beyond reach. The risks this brings to the portfolios of asset managers and owners are enormous.” The statement urges governments to address the “gaps—in climate ambition, policy action and risk disclosure—[that] need to be addressed with urgency.”

SEC Chair testifies before House Committee on Financial Services—climate, human capital and cybersecurity disclosure proposals likely delayed

On Tuesday, SEC Chair Gary Gensler testified for over four hours (without a break!) before the thousands (it seemed) of members of the House Committee on Financial Services.  His formal testimony covered a number of topics on the SEC’s agenda that Gensler (and others) have addressed numerous times in past: market structure and equity markets, predictive analytics, crypto, issuer disclosure, China, SPACs and Rule 10b5-1 plans and was remarkably similar to his formal testimony in September before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.  (See, e.g., this PubCo post and this PubCo post.) If you followed any of the coverage of Gensler’s testimony before the Senate committee (see this PubCo post), there was a Groundhog-Day feel to much of the questioning, but the five-minute limitation on questioning (because there are thousands of House committee members) did not really offer much opportunity for in-depth conversation about anything.   

ISS releases results of 2021 broad policy and climate surveys

ISS has just released the results of its 2021 global benchmark policy survey, which, this year, actually comprises two surveys—one related to a broad array of policies and the other specifically addressing climate change. Along with issues related to executive pay and governance, the broad survey also addressed issues such as non-financial ESG performance metrics in executive compensation, racial equity audits and virtual-only shareholder meetings. The climate survey solicited views on topics such as board oversight of climate risks, say-on-climate proposals and other issues relevant to ISS’ climate voting policy.

The Conference Board shares insights on how to convey your “sustainability story”

How do companies tackle the assignment of conveying to their shareholders and other stakeholders how they approach sustainability—in a way that is accurate, clear and genuine and that does not sound like a confected facsimile of every other peer company?  That sounds like a challenging task.  To address that challenge, The Conference Board convened a working group of over 300 executives from more than 150 companies who met five times between July 2020 and May 2021 to share ideas about how companies can effectively “tell their sustainability stories.” The Board captured some of those ideas in this report.

Climate risk disclosure “glaringly absent” in financial statements? Will regulators act to require more?

In one of the illustrative comments in Corp Fin’s just published sample comment letter on climate issues, Corp Fin asks companies to explain what consideration they may have given to providing in their SEC filings the same type of expansive climate-related disclosure that’s in their corporate social responsibility reports. One place in companies’ SEC filings where climate-related disclosure is “glaringly absent,” according to this report from the Carbon Tracker Initiative, is in the financial statements.  Although many companies face serious climate risk, and many have even made net-zero pledges, the report “found little evidence that companies or their auditors considered climate-related matters in the 2020 financial statements.”  According to the lead author of the report, “[b]ased on the significant exposure these companies have to transition risks, and with many announcing emissions targets, we expected substantially more consideration of climate matters in the financials than we found. Without this information there is little way of knowing the extent of capital at risk, or if funds are being allocated to unsustainable businesses….” Financial statement disclosure was so deficient, the report concluded, investors were essentially “flying blind.”

How do companies address governance issues for corporate political activity?

In the last couple of years, many CEOs have felt the need to voice their views on political, environmental and social issues, such as racial justice and voting restrictions. For example, after the murder of George Floyd and resulting national protests, many of the country’s largest corporations expressed solidarity and pledged support for racial justice. After January 6, a number of companies announced that their corporate PACs had suspended—temporarily or permanently—their contributions to one or both political parties or to lawmakers who objected to certification of the presidential election. However, as The Conference Board has recently stated, in the current “era of intense political polarization in the United States, and with the immediacy, ubiquity, and (often) inaccuracy of social media, companies are subject to ever-greater scrutiny for their political activities.” In this article, Deloitte and the Society for Corporate Governance report on a survey they conducted in July 2021 about companies’ approaches to publicly addressing controversial social and political issues. As the authors note, “taking a stance publicly on controversial or sensitive topics poses both risks and opportunities, including alienating or appealing to key stakeholders; enhancing or damaging the corporate culture; and eroding or building trust and brand reputation,” leading some companies to consider more systematically how they approach public engagement on these types of issues.

How reliable is your company’s carbon footprint?

Just how reliable are those carbon footprints that many large companies have been publishing in their sustainability reports?  Even putting aside concerns about greenwashing, what about those nebulous Scope 3 GHG emissions?  As we all know, the SEC is now is the midst of developing a proposal for mandatory climate-related disclosure.  (See, e.g., this PubCo post and this PubCo post.)  The WSJ reports that “[o]ne problem facing regulators and companies: Some of the most important and widely used data is hard to both measure and verify.” According to an academic cited in the article, the “measurement, target-setting, and management of Scope 3 is a mess….There is a wide range of uncertainty in Scope 3 emissions measurement…to the point that numbers can be absurdly off.”