On 3 December 2019, ACCA, the IIRC, and CFA Institute are hosting an event—Sustainable Finance and the Role of Corporate Governance and Reporting—in Brussels, Belgium. This event will be a lively discussion on the crucial role of corporate governance and reporting in the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investment process, and how integration and impact are the way forward. This event will also serve as the Brussels launch of Social and Environmental Value Creation, a report jointly produced by ACCA and the CFA Institute, which examines the roles that business and finance are fulfilling in meeting these new challenges.
At present, many tools do exist to align corporate strategies with social and environmental outcomes, but demands are growing for more precision and transformative change. Businesses and their finance teams are increasingly called upon to monitor and report on social and environmental risks and improve business models to redefine how they create value. This is becoming a genuine and strategic shift to more effectively disclosing and managing risks, understanding dependencies, and exploring new opportunities for participating in and contributing to a changing economy that is decoupled from environmental degradation and recoupled to societal benefit. The investment industry is also increasingly focusing on the role and importance of ESG factors in corporate value creation and risk mitigation, and corporate disclosures as well as wider ESG data serve as the bedrock for these investment processes.