The Future of ESG Data 2021 - Virtual Conference

Welcome and opening remarks

Peter Cripps, Editor, Environmental Finance

Day one Keynote

Speaker:
Ashley Ian Alder, CEO, Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) and Chair of the Board of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO)

PANEL: The regulatory agenda – disclosure preparedness and global regulatory advances

• How can regulators and regulations keep up with rapidly changing ESG demands and data? How much should be left to market self-regulation?
• EU taxonomy, SFDR and SEC working group – how prepared are companies for new disclosure requirements? How have national regulations helped prepare some countries better than others?
• How could mandatory disclosure requirements affect companies in the US? Should future ESG disclosures to be made publicly or privately to the SEC? What are the liability complications of forward-looking metric disclosure?
• How will the EU sustainable finance action plan change the shape of ESG data?
• Global regulations – what approach are non-EU jurisdictions taking?

Moderator:
Peter Cripps, Editor, Environmental Finance

Speakers:
Marina Pertroleka, Global Head of ESG Research, Fitch
Thomas Harding, Associate Vice President, Regulatory Solutions Product Development, ISS ESG
Saskia Slomp, CEO, EFRAG

PRESENTATION: Overview of global ESG disclosure regulations - with focus on the challenges and potential technological solutions to adhering to EU regulations

Rodolphe Bocquet, Head of Partnerships, Clarity AI

PANEL: The future of ESG data reporting and harmonising reporting frameworks

• What initiatives are attempting to harmonise frameworks? What progress is being made? Will there ever be a gold standard, or is this a pipe dream?
• What can we learn from the prototype climate standard?
• How would a global standard interact with jurisdictional regimes, such as the EU's?
• A lack of common denominators - How can ESG performance and impact across different sectors, metrics and companies be compared? How can the challenges of comparing environmental impacts with social impacts be overcome? Are universal, standardised metric possible or even preferable?
• What role will broader metrics and the UN SDGs play in gauging and comparing ESG performance and impact?
• ESG performance data – should it be reported more frequently? Which data points and metrics would benefit from monthly, quarterly, or biannual reporting?
• Annual report integrations and framing ESG as pre financial rather than non-financial – what are the costs and benefits of integrated reporting? What will it mean for the role of auditors?

Speakers:
Alain Deckers, Director - Corporate reporting, audit and credit rating agencies, DG FISMA, European Commission
Eliza Mahdavy-Turcat, Head of ESG Performance team, EDF
Mardi McBrien, Managing Director, Climate Disclosures Standards Board (CDSB)
Wilco van Heteren, Executive Director of ESG Research, Sustainalytics

Keynote Interview: Allison Herren Lee, Commissioner, The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)

PANEL: ESG and investment returns - incorporating ESG data into investment decisions

• How can identifying an ESG strategy help drive investment decisions?
• What solutions are there for quantifying the correlation between ESG performance and financial performance?
• How can investors best align what they are trying to achieve with their investments and which ESG metrics to prioritise?
• What engagement routes are most effective when it comes to encouraging companies to report on ESG data?
• What factors must be considered when devising a data strategy?
• How can investors incorporate data into investment decisions?
• Where are the biggest holes in ESG data for investors?
• What are the most significant upcoming developments for ESG data?

Moderator:
Thomas Cox, Senior Writer, Environmental Finance

Speakers:
Dr. Heiko Bailer, Head of ESG Quantitative Investments, RepRisk
Richard Burrett, Chief Sustainability Officer, Earth Capital
Eric Van Nostrand, Head of Research for Multi-Asset Strategies & Sustainable Investments, BlackRock
Chee Wee Tan, Senior Environmental and Social Specialist (Private Sector), AIIB

Fireside Chat: The Future of ESG Assessments

Investors and the wider financial community are demanding more rigor and transparency for their ESG analysis in order to effectively discriminate the ESG quality of not only entities, but also financial instruments. Against this backdrop, we will explore why analysis at an instrument level is becoming more important and how criteria and methodologies are being developed to help investors make more informed, objective ESG investment decisions.

Andrew Steel, Managing Director, Global Head, Sustainable Fitch
with Thomas Cox, Senior Writer, Environmental Finance

PANEL: Next frontiers – moving beyond climate metrics and considering how other environmental, social and governance data metrics will mature

• Going beyond operational ESG reporting - How can products, services, scope 3 emissions and supply chain ESG performance be better reported? What strategies are available to close the outsourcing of emissions and more accurately evaluate supply chain ESG data?
• Closing the outsourcing of emissions - how can scope 3 emissions and supply chain ESG performance be better reported? What strategies are available to accurately evaluate the emissions and other ESG performance for the products and services of a company?
• What steps are being taken to improve asset location and ownership data? How could this affect the reporting and verification of ESG data?
• To what extent has Covid-19 stress tested and emphasised the importance of supply chain and governance variables? How will increased focus manifest in terms of expected governance and supply chain reporting?
• Social metrics – are they too qualitative to become quantitative? What further guidance can regulators provide for social metric reporting? How can materiality and the link between performance on social metrics and financial performance be tracked?
• How can human rights be best incorporated into ESG reporting?

Moderator:
Madeline Jenkins, Reporter, Environmental Finance

Speakers:
Keeran Gwilliam-Beeharee, Executive Director for Market Access, V.E, Part of Moody's ESG Solutions
Owen Hewlett, Chief Technical Officer, Gold Standard
Laura Hobbs, Responsible Investment Manager, Brunel Pension Partnership
Marcelo Jordan, Senior Portfolio Manager and ESG specialist, World Bank Group Pensions

Welcome and opening remarks

Host:

Madeline Jenkins, Reporter, Environmental Finance

Day two Keynote: ESG data & tools – what investors need

Speakers:
Nathan Fabian, Chief responsible investment officer, Principles for Responsible Investment

PANEL: The future of ESG data - understanding ESG ratings and scores

• Do ESG rating firms need to be regulated?
• How could greater methodological transparency turn the low correlation in ESG ratings into a selling point for investors with specific investment and ESG performance goals?
• Too many questionnaires not enough engagement? How can ESG data companies liaise with corporations more effectively to produce more accurate results? Moving from the tick box to the meaningful – who defines the material metrics for each sector, country, region, company?
• Is the future of ESG data disclosed by companies or taken from other sources? What will it mean for data ownership? How can greater data transparency at a corporate disclosure level and ESG rating level be achieved?
• What solutions do ESG data providers have to fill ESG data gaps? Which metrics lend themselves to projections and which data gaps cannot be filled? How can transparency and big company bias be overcome and ensure a lack of data does not artificially deflate ESG ratings?
• How will consolidation of ESG data providers and integration with financial rating agencies and stock exchanges affect the market and data/ratings provided? How will ESG scores interact with credit scores in the future? What role will stock exchanges play in encouraging corporate ESG disclosure? What role could benchmark administrators play in ESG data and ratings?
• What technology solutions could help normalise and understand different ESG ratings and scores?

Moderator:
Ahren Lester, Assistant Editor, Environmental Finance

Speakers:
Jonathan Scott Webb, Senior Data Scientist - Responsible Investing, Nuveen
Andreas Kusche, Investor Relations, Daimler AG
Satoshi Ikeda, Chief Sustainable Finance Officer, Financial Services Agency (FSA)
Jessica Bede, Senior Manager, Climate Investment Standards, American Carbon Registry, An Enterprise of Winrock International
Hendrik Bartel, Senior Director, Environmental, Social, and Governance Strategy, Factset

Case Study: A corporate perspective on ESG reporting

Lene Bjørn Serpa, Head of Sustainability, A.P. Moller-Maersk

PANEL: ESG data - moving beyond risks and making an impact

• How are perspectives on existing ESG data and reporting evolving from risk based to opportunity based? To what extent are ESG data points such as human capital being considered as an asset rather than cost?
• What steps are being taken to map newer ESG performance indicators onto more traditional financial performance indicators? What does/will fiduciary duty require?
• How can ESG performance be better understood in terms of output, impact, and additionality? How can an increased awareness of local contexts and baselines improve the understanding of relative impact and absolute impact?
• Breaking the silos – the argument for merging impact and sustainability reporting and data - Should impact and double materiality be built into ESG ratings, or should they be separate?
• Double materiality – what strategies are there for apportioning ESG performance and impact across the supply chain and aggregate investor impact? Should regulators step in to better define double materiality and reporting practices?
• Additionality and asset management – how important is it to differentiate between investor impact and company impact?

Moderator:
Michael Hurley, Deputy Editor, Environmental Finance

Speakers:
Natalie Gartmann, ESG and Impact Manager, Pegasus Capital Advisors
Dr Rupini Deepa Rajagopalan, Head of ESG Office, Wealth and Asset Management, Berenberg
Aaron Pinnock, Impact Investment Analyst, Church Commissioners for England
Greg Murphy, Managing Director – Impact, Ecofin

Fireside Chat – Asset owner’s perspective on sustainability reporting and disclosure requirements

Moderator:
Michael Hurley, Deputy Editor, Environmental Finance

Speakers:
Stephen Barrie, Deputy Director (Ethics and Engagement), Church of England Pensions Board 

PANEL: Forward looking metrics and judging transition

• Forward looking metrics, transition, and company strategy and targets – can it be a more accurate gauge of company ESG performance?
• How can a transition plan be quantified? What are the main challenges and opportunities of metrics such as planned CapEx and OpEx, board room sentiment and implicit messages? Is it currently possible to clearly track ROI on CapEx or OpEx focussed on improving ESG performance?
• How are targets, statements and projections being verified? Who is checking to see if targets are being hit or previous projections were accurate? What are the potential liability complications of forward-looking metric disclosure?
• To what extent can forward looking metrics help bridge the data gap in regions and industries with scarce ESG data and make them more comparable?
• How can momentum be tracked, and signals interpreted to determine a company on the brink of higher impact and ESG performance?
• What steps are being taken to factor climate risk into forward looking analysis?
• How can data be used to make proactive rather than reactive investments based on ESG data? How can new technologies help overcome the ESG data lag?

Moderator:
Peter Cripps, Editor, Environmental Finance

Speaker:
Danielle Brassel, Responsible Investment Analyst, Zurich Insurance Group
Laural Peacock, Director of Sustainability, NRG
Lotte Griek, Head of ESG Research Solutions, S&P Global
Pontus Lidbrink, Senior Portfolio Manager, AP4

The Private Market ESG Data Gap: Measuring Risk & Impact

Speaker:
Jaclyn Bouchard, Executive Vice President and Head of ESG, Preqin

The Heat is On - Taking the temperature of companies and funds

Helen Droz, Vice President, Climate Risk Research, MSCI