Finance

Description

These resources will help you to embed sustainability into your company’s processes for raising and allocating capital, such as aligning values with investment sources, investor relations, business planning, and budgeting.

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Resources

Integrating Sustainability Across Operations

Principles of Integrated Capitals Assessments cover

Principles of Integrated Capitals Assessments

This guide from the Capitals Coalition can help you make more holistic capitals assessments by accounting for natural, human, and social capital. It is designed to promote more consistency in how capital assessments are conducted. The first section outlines the spectrum capitals assessments, from ‘single capital assessments’ to ‘multi-capital assessments’ through to ‘integrated capitals assessments. The second section provides a five-principle framework designed to support the use of integrated capitals assessments. This guide will be most useful to sustainability and finance departments.

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A4S Essential Guide: Strategic Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting

In a changing world where the long-term economic, social, and environmental outlook is tremendously complex and uncertain, it has become increasingly difficult to respond to emergent trends. This guide from A4S was designed to improve decision-making and risk management by providing finance teams with tools, practical examples, and guidance on how to integrate sustainability into strategic planning, budgeting, and forecasting.

A4S Essential Guide to Valuations and Climate Change cover

A4S Essential Guide to Valuations and Climate Change

Understanding and assessing climate change impacts is critical to determining the value of businesses and making sound investment decisions. This guide from A4S features a five-step framework to help investors and valuators incorporate climate change risks and opportunities into valuations, and includes case studies and practical advice on performing valuation analysis.

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Biodiversity Finance Reference Guide

The IFC has developed this guide to help you to better understand project eligibility criteria for biodiversity finance, as well as some of the more common project types. The guide builds on the Green Bond Principles and the Green Loan Principles and highlights different types of investment projects, activities, and components that help protect, maintain, or enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services, as well as promote the sustainable management of natural resources. This is a good resource for identifying opportunities to address the key drivers of biodiversity loss in your production practices; to integrate nature-based solutions into their operations; and to develop nature conservation activities.

Win-Win-Win: The Sustainable Supply Chain Finance Opportunity cover

Win-Win-Win: The Sustainable Supply Chain Finance Opportunity

This report from BSR highlights mechanisms - such as sustainable trade loans and smart contract solutions - that will help you to leverage supply chain finance to incentivize and scale sustainable behaviour among your suppliers.

Financial innovation for SME net zero transition: Role of banks and buyers cover

Financial innovation for SME net zero transition: Role of banks and buyers

This report from University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) and BSR explains how you can decarbonise your value chain by supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It covers four potential solutions to the common barriers SMEs face in reaching net zero, including a diagnostic tool to assess SME climate readiness; a shared repository for SME sustainability data; SME decarbonisation roadmaps; and a net zero support services marketplace. This guidance will be most useful to external facing teams, including procurement and supply chain management, as well as your sustainability team.

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How to Talk to Your CFO About Sustainability

This article explains how to use the five-step Return on Sustainability Investment (ROSI) method to help CFOs make the connection between financial performance and sustainability. This resource will especially benefit change agents who are trying to show how proposed sustainability acitivities will meet ROI imperatives.

Investing to Support Change

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The TPI Tool

Created by the Transition Pathway Initiative, the TPI tool can help you to assess the alignment of your investments with the goals of the Paris Agreement. This corporate climate action benchmark assesses how prepared companies are for the transition to a low-carbon economy. Using publicly disclosed company information, the TPI tool evaluates and tracks companies based on two dimensions: the quality of companies’ management of their greenhouse gas emissions and of risks and opportunities related to the low-carbon transition, and how companies’ planned or expected future carbon performance compares to international targets and national pledges made as part of the Paris Agreement.

The Transition Pathway Initiative also publishes discussion papers, explainers, reports, and carbon performance assessments for numerous sectors and industries, among other resources.

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Net Zero Investment Framework Implementation Guide

The Net Zero Investment Framework provides a common set of recommended actions, metrics, and methodologies that can help investors to define strategies, measure alignment, and transition portfolios in ways that support net zero emissions future. Developed by the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC), this is a good resource for investors and asset owners that want to decarbonise their investment portfolios and increase investment in climate solutions in ways that are consistent with the 1.5°C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement.

The IIGCC has also developed supplemental guidance on target-setting, investor expectations of corporate transition plans, recommendations for specific asset classes, and more.

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Return on Sustainability Investment (ROSI) Methodology

Although business and societal success depends on sustainability, most businesses companies struggle with demonstrating the monetary impact of their sustainability efforts as they seek to address ESG issues. In response, the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business (CSB) has developed the Return on Sustainability Investment (ROSI) methodology. The ROSI methodology was created to help companies measure the financial returns on their sustainability activities and, thus bridging the gap between sustainability strategies and financial performance and allowing users to build a better business case for current and future sustainability initiatives.

CSB offers in-depth resources on ROSI, including a step-by-step overview; original research publications and an interactive research database; industry case studies on implementing ROSI; Excel tools for testing ROSI focused on risk, talent, and operational efficiency; and a free online course module for building a case for sustainability.

This suite of resources will help you to assess the value created by sustainability strategies, to track sustainability-related financial performance in real time, and to assess the potential ROI of future sustainability initiatives at both the firm and the division level.

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Investment Patterns and Leverage

This brief from Re:Structure Lab can help you to better understand how investment patterns can be better prioritised and leveraged to combat forced labour and other pervasive forms of social inequity. It explains how changing patterns of investment are creating structural constraints on labour costs and are directly and indirectly driving the use of forced labour, and it provides recommendations for correcting these trends. It also identifies meaningful action investors can take to promote decent work.

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Financing a Just Transition: A Business Brief

This brief from the UN Global Compact can help you understand how your organisation’s financial practices can advance a Just Transition. It begins by explaining four ways finance can contribute to this transition, such as supporting necessary data infrastructure; stewarding assets through social dialogue; allocating capital toward transition investment needs; and working collaboratively with other businesses and the public sector. It then looks at how finance can support the transition in four areas, strategy, governance, risk management, and metrics and targets. The guidance will be useful to Finance teams including Chief Finance Officers, Chief Investment Officers, and Chief Risk Officers.

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Impact-Weighted Accounts Project

This project from the Harvard Business School was initiated to drive the creation of financial accounts that better reflect a company’s financial, social, and environmental performance. Transparently capturing such external impacts can help with investor and managerial decision-making and better ensure that human, social, and natural capital is accounted forImpact. This platform explains the importance of reimagining capitalism and the role that impact-weighted accounts can play; explains alternative ways in which value can be assessed; highlights the opportunities of impact-weighted accounting; and features data visualisations and links to relevant research to support your learning on the subject.

From Risk to Reward: The Business Imperative to Finance Climate Adaptation and Resilience cover

From Risk to Reward: The Business Imperative to Finance Climate Adaptation and Resilience

The negative economic effects of increasing extreme weather are no longer based on scenarios - they are happening in real time. This report from Boston Consulting Group and others can help you understand the business case for prioritising investment in adaptation and resilience. It shows that such investments present an opportunity to drive value in three ways: by protecting assets, supply chains, and operations; by growing the market of adaptation and resilience solutions through investment and climate-resilient revenue streams; and by collaborating with the public sector to finance and implement adaptation and resilience activities. For each opportunity the guide explains the business benefits and identifies entry points. This resource will be most useful to finance teams and sustainability professionals.  

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Greening Cash Action Guide

This guide from the Exponential Roadmap Initiative tackles a specific and under-the-radar emissions contributor: companies' cash holdings. It outlines actionable steps you can take to reduce the emissions associated with cash holdings, which financial partners may be investing into emission-producing activities. The guidance will be useful to business leaders, sustainability managers, board members, and other employees interested in better aligning your companies’ financial activities with its climate commitments.

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Definitions for Responsible Investment Approaches

These guidelines from the CFA Institute, the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), and the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance (GSIA) were created to help harmonise sustainability investment terminology, improve investment industry communications, and reduce the risk of greenwashing. It focuses on key responsible investment approaches, including screening, ESG integration, thematic investing, stewardship, and impact investing. This resource defines and explains each of these terms, and provides guidance for using the terms in practice. This resource will be especially helpful for investors, regulators, and sustainability teams.