In the following Forbes op-ed, Dr. Bob Eccles reviews TIIP’s new report on Measuring Effectiveness: Roadmap to Assessing System-level and SDG Investing. From the op-ed:
“Companies and investors are being asked to support the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 — what some have described as “the closest thing the Earth has to a strategy”— since the public sector alone does not have the resources to do so. With Professor Costanza Consolandi of the University of Siena I have written about how companies can use the work of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) to assess the impact they are having on the SDGs.
But what about investors? For them the problem is a more difficult one since they hold large portfolios of companies and must aggregate information about all of them. An additional complexity is that the very large asset owners and asset managers must pay increasing attention to the system-level effects of their investments. Are their investments making a positive or negative contribution to the financial, environmental, and social systems that support human life on Earth? Sudden shocks (e.g., the Financial Crisis of 2008) and steady and persistent degradations (e.g., from climate change to inequality) in these systems will make it impossible for investors to earn the returns expected by their ultimate beneficiaries—all of us…”
Read more here.
