Cynthia Figge, co-founder and CEO of CSRHub, joined Nareit for a video interview at Nareit’s 2018 ESG Forum in Seattle.
Figge described CSRHub, which she co-founded in 2007, as the “largest aggregation of ESG metrics worldwide.” CSRHub rates 17,000 companies on ESG measures and aggregates data from more than 500 sources, she noted.
According to Figge, companies that are high performers are performing well across all dimensions of ESG, “and that’s really tough to do because it’s very hard work.”
On a range of zero to 100, the lowest-ranked companies tend to be rated around 40 and the highest are ranked in the 70’s, Figge explained.
“Although there is some improvement, we’re not seeing companies move into the Holy Grail of 80 to 100,” Figge said. She noted that the bar for performance has gone up and more companies are reporting ESG than before, so there’s more pressure for disclosure.
“Companies that are not disclosing are getting penalized in ways that they weren’t before,” Figge said.