Delivering our interim presentation for the Sustainable Investing Research Consulting Project was an important milestone. Our team worked diligently to synthesize the research conducted so far into a clear presentation articulating our objectives, approach, and preliminary analysis. I gained a much deeper understanding of the project by contributing to this collaborative effort to communicate our progress to the client.
Over the course of the research, the first thing we figured out was a framework to divide the companies being analyzed into three broad categories. Our initial research indicates that there is a noticeable overlap between ESG-related incentives and actual ESG performance. Sectors like finance and consumer products were transparent about the ESG performance and had shown considerable progress while on other hand sectors like manufacturing and mining were pretty nontransparent about their ESG initiatives. Some companies especially very differentiable by sector were doing the bare minimum to comply with regulations but were not trying to create any tangible impact.
Another important observation was the noticeable change in the way metrics were reported by the companies given the evolution of regulations. The companies are required to do way more due to regulations. This highlighted the importance of regulations and the need for sector specific regulations according to the benchmark in that industry so that there is tangible output.
It was quite an enlightening experience to see the how various companies behave under various regulations and how challenging it can be to collect data. It would be interesting to now collect data for all companies and verify this initial hypothesis and also benchmark them against a set standard.