Neil Stewart, director of corporate outreach, senior market leader, Canada, at the Value Reporting Foundation, participated in a video interview during REITwise 2022: Nareit's Law, Accounting & Finance Conference held in Orlando, Florida on March 23-25.
Stewart commented on the range of ESG reporting platforms. “The ESG ecosystem is crowded, it’s noisy, it was built out of a patchwork of standards and frameworks that were really meant for different audiences and for different purposes,” he said.
Now, however, there are just a handful of standards focused on the information needs of different audiences, Stewart said. The key ones now are the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), focused on the information needs of investors, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), meant for a broader audience, and the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD).
Meanwhile, Stewart noted that until now, investors haven’t had a common language to discuss sustainability performance. That has now changed, with the advent of consistent, comparable, reliable information allowing investors to really compare performance, he said.
ESG information is being brought up to the same level of quality, consistency, and reliability as financial information, allowing ESG information to be used in investment decision making, Stewart added.