Good decisions need good data
10-year Blueprint commitments:
- advocate for meaningful, forward-looking and globally comparable company disclosure and investor reporting;
- promote the inclusion of material ESG information alongside other financial data;
- encourage consolidation of reporting standards and regimes;
- seek to understand and overcome situations where available data is not being used effectively;
- develop the PRI Reporting Framework to measure the contribution that responsible investment makes to tangible ESG improvements in the real world; and
- enhance the PRI Data Portal, empowering asset owners to assess investment managers’ responsible investment activity.
Driving meaningful ESG data throughout markets is a key area of our 10-year Blueprint, to support signatories in considering their investment risks and returns, and to help them measure real-world outcomes.
To meet these commitments and help to make ESG data more consistent and comparable, we have continued to support efforts aimed at harmonising corporate ESG reporting in the interests of investor decision making, including engaging with the IFRS Foundation’s sustainability reporting proposal and the European Union’s Non-Financial Reporting Directive review.
However, harmonising existing standards is only part of the overall pursuit of driving meaningful data for responsible investors. As markets are increasingly focused on the alignment or contribution of corporate and investor activity in meeting sustainability goals, the data required to make better investment decisions needs to be reexamined.
As a result, we published a paper assessing the basis of an end-to-end sustainability reporting system and have proposed a framework that incorporates financial materiality and performance linked to making progress on sustainability outcomes. We will take this work forward as part of the next three-year strategy (see below).
Driving meaningful data in our 2021-24 strategy
Our work over the next three years will focus on contributing to the development of a global sustainability reporting system for investors and corporations. We will accelerate the inclusion of sustainability outcomes data alongside ESG risk/opportunity and financial data in our reporting and assessment (across asset classes and priority ESG issues) and externally with regulators, standard setters, and other investor initiatives.
We will:
- address overlaps and gaps in sustainability reporting to investors;
- support the development and uptake of harmonised and meaningful data on sustainability performance and outcomes.
Collaboration with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD)
In August 2020, we announced a collaboration with the WBCSD to drive corporate-investor action on sustainability. We will aim to make this central to financial and strategic decision making by encouraging dialogue between investors and corporates, providing an opportunity for both to examine sustainability reporting developments and ensure their needs are reflected.
Developing the Reporting Framework
The new PRI Reporting Framework includes several mandatory outcomes-focused questions that cover the processes signatories use to identify and understand the intended or unintended sustainability outcomes of their investment activities. This is linked to our work on enabling real-world impact.
Key target
Asset owner signatories are using the PRI data portal: 78%
(PRI target: 75%)
