The ESG Report 2022

As the Covid-19 pandemic raised interest in sustainability and the COP26 summit highlighted action to address the climate crisis, it is no surprise that the White Space framework should show significant demand for content addressing both themes. Other areas demonstrating significant interest include resilience, Sustainable Development Goals, and ESG.

Despite rising concern over the world's dependence on fossil fuels, our analysis shows that renewable energy solutions are often overlooked, with several themes offering opportunities for asset managers to own. These ranged from solar, tidal, and hydroelectric power to green hydrogen, while demand for content around fossil fuels continues to persist.

Even though asset managers are becoming gradually more sophisticated in their responses to climate change, there remains significant demand for firms to communicate how their commitments and activities relate to nature. White Space themes included biodiversity, deforestation, flooding, soil erosion, and pollution.

2021 created a sense of urgency for asset managers to communicate the positive impact of their investments to climate-related targets. Chief among these were stewardship efforts, divestment, transparency, and SFDR, with greenwashing remaining a key area of interest considering several prominent scandals over the past 12 months.

The area of the ESG conversation that asset managers have most effectively mastered is in communicating around their investment products. As a result, it comes as no surprise that this is the most saturated area of the ESG media landscape. Despite that, a handful of products are under-indexed including ESG ETFs, carbon offsets and carbon credits.

Previously overlooked in favour of environmental factors, social factors are quickly becoming a critical focus of investors and other stakeholders on how asset managers can influence positive change in the companies they own and within their own firms. Key areas of white space included gender pay-gap and female leadership, as well as microfinance and affordable housing.