ESG & Sustainable
How do you measure something as slippery as a company's environmental and social impact, and can you trust the score?
These explainers tackle that head-on: ESG scoring and the major raters, climate-risk disclosure under TCFD and the ISSB, the EU's SFDR and taxonomy, and the green and sustainability-linked bonds that fund the transition.
Greenwashing gets its own scrutiny, along with how to read a rating critically.
IWP Concepts separates the regulation and the underlying data from the marketing gloss, so an ESG label tells you something real.
The result is the ability to navigate sustainability frameworks, disclosure rules, and the instruments built around them with a clear eye.
ESG scoring is the practice of grading a company on environmental, social, and governance factors and combining those…
MSCI and Sustainalytics are the two largest commercial providers of ESG ratings for public companies and funds. Their…
Greenwashing is the practice of making environmental, social, or governance claims that are overstated, misleading, or…
Climate risk is the financial risk that a warming planet and the policy response to it pose to individual companies,…
Green bonds are debt instruments where the issuer commits to spend the proceeds on projects with specified…
Sustainability-linked bonds tie a bond's coupon (or redemption) to the issuer's performance on specific sustainability…
Impact investing is the practice of putting capital into assets or enterprises with the intention of generating…
The UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) and jurisdictional stewardship codes are the two main…
Energy transition finance is the set of capital flows that fund the shift from fossil fuels to lower-carbon energy…
The TCFD was a Financial Stability Board working group that published the first widely adopted framework for how…
The ISSB is the IFRS Foundation's board for sustainability reporting standards, created to give investors a single…
SFDR is the European Union rulebook that forces asset managers and financial advisers to disclose how sustainability…
The EU Taxonomy is a classification system that defines which economic activities qualify as environmentally…
The Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2019/2088, requires asset managers and financial…
The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, Directive (EU) 2022/2464, expands who must report on sustainability…
The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) published a voluntary framework for how companies and…
SASB Standards are industry-specific sustainability disclosure standards that identify the subset of ESG issues most…
Scope 3 emissions are the greenhouse gases released across a company's value chain, upstream and downstream of its own…
Transition finance is capital directed at activities and companies that are not yet low-carbon but are moving credibly…
A green bond is a debt instrument whose proceeds finance environmentally beneficial projects, with use-of-proceeds,…
A sustainability-linked loan is a syndicated or bilateral loan whose interest margin steps up or down based on the…
A sustainability-linked bond (SLB) is a general-purpose bond whose coupon, redemption, or other financial terms change…
A transition bond is a debt instrument whose proceeds, or whose performance terms, finance a hard-to-abate issuer's…
The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) issued its final recommendations in September 2023,…
Principal adverse impacts (PAI) are negative effects of investment decisions on environmental and social factors that…
The EU social taxonomy is a proposed classification system, developed by the Platform on Sustainable Finance in 2022,…
Just transition finance is capital deployed in support of decarbonisation strategies that are designed to be fair to…
A living wage is the remuneration sufficient for a worker and their family to afford a basic but decent standard of…
Water stewardship disclosure is the structured reporting of an organisation's water dependencies, impacts, risks, and…