Library | ESG issues
Corporate Strategy
Corporate strategy involves the comprehensive plan a company employs to achieve its long-term objectives, encompassing decisions on resource allocation, market participation, and competitive positioning. Integrating sustainability into corporate strategy enables organisations to create long-term stakeholder value. This approach offers advantages such as enhancing brand value, meeting consumer demands, increasing efficiency, attracting top talent, and opening new market opportunities.
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BSI Net Zero Barometer Report Series
This benchmark series examines the UK business landscape's transition to net zero. It tracks commitment levels, drivers, and barriers among senior decision-makers. The research explores how organisations are reframing sustainability as a commercial necessity and highlights the demand for government support, financial incentives, and standardised guidance to achieve 2050 targets.
Guarantees: From misdiagnosis to strategic deployment: Evidence from expert practitioner interviews
This research examines why climate-aligned guarantees often fail to mobilise private capital effectively. It identifies structural misalignments within multilateral development banks and suggests that strategic deployment requires a move towards portfolio-based approaches, local-currency financing, and better risk layering to address specific investment constraints in emerging markets.
Artificial intelligence and the future of finance: A framework for structural change
This report examines how artificial intelligence is transforming capital markets by shifting the industry from informational scarcity to analytical abundance. It introduces a structural framework involving capability, adoption, substitution, and recomposition, exploring alternative future states and the evolving nature of fiduciary accountability, market stability, and professional expertise.
Firm data on AI
This research provides international data on firm-level artificial intelligence adoption across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia. While current impacts on employment and productivity are small, senior executives predict a 1.4 per cent productivity boost and a 0.7 per cent reduction in employment over the next three years.
Business-led blended finance: A practical playbook
This report examines business-led blended finance, which grew to US$24 billion in 2024. It provides a practical playbook for companies to move from passive recipients to active deal architects, addressing the US$4 trillion SDG financing gap through risk management toolkits, sector analyses, and eight global case studies.
Templates in the EU Inc. regulation proposal
This research evaluates the European Commission’s Proposal for an optional 28th corporate law regime. It argues that proposed model articles of association fail to support venture capital-backed firms. The authors identify four shortcomings regarding scope, process, logic, and safe-harbour effects, suggesting a dedicated drafting track and broader coverage.
Stakeholder governance and corporate purpose in certified B Corps: Minimizing conflict and fostering collaboration
This research examines how Australian and New Zealand B Corporations implement stakeholder governance through corporate purpose. Based on 20 interviews, it identifies six roles for purpose in decision-making and signalling. The findings suggest that purpose-led models help attract supportive stakeholders and foster collaboration beyond mere conflict resolution.
The total portfolio approach (TPA): A practical guide for navigating the transition to TPA
The report examines the Total Portfolio Approach as an alternative to traditional strategic asset allocation. Drawing on interviews and survey evidence, it explains TPA’s investment, governance, risk, sustainability and organisational foundations, outlines a five-level transition pathway, and provides practical guidance for asset owners assessing readiness and implementation.
Women's empowerment principles series
This series examines how businesses integrate women’s empowerment and gender equality across leadership, workplaces, marketplaces and communities. It uses the Women’s Empowerment Principles Gender Gap Analysis Tool to assess corporate policies and practices, support benchmarking and identify opportunities for businesses to strengthen gender equality approaches over time.
Corporate Health Check 2026: The annual state of Earth-positive business action
The CDP 2026 Corporate Health Check, produced with Oliver Wyman, demonstrates that environmental leadership aligns with financial performance. While a 15% leadership cohort achieves 4% annual emission reductions, a major gap persists in adaptation finance. The report identifies four key levers for building resilience and capturing emerging commercial opportunities.
FCLT Gold Standard: Information and resources
FCLTGlobal’s Gold Standard provides criteria for asset owners, asset managers and companies to support long-term value creation. It outlines recommended practices across governance, incentives, engagement, metrics and future success, including long-term performance measurement, aligned remuneration, sustainability reporting, carbon pricing, diverse decision-making and investment in innovation.
Profits and social impacts: Complements vs. tradeoffs for lenders in three countries
This research examines the tradeoff between lender profits and social impact using machine learning across three countries. It demonstrates that algorithmic targeting significantly boosts profit margins in South Africa and the Philippines but may reduce financial inclusion for women and low-income borrowers unless balanced strategies are implemented.
Financial Innovation Knowledge Platform
CPI's platform offering practical tools, research, and guidance for public and private actors developing and investing in climate finance vehicles.
Responsible investing maturity matrix: Emerging markets
A maturity framework for VC funds and LPs to assess ESG and responsible investment integration across emerging market fund operations.
Corporate diversification and corporate carbon performance
This research examines how corporate diversification and cash flow coinsurance reduce carbon intensity in Japanese firms. It finds that industrial diversification alleviates financing constraints, enabling substantial decarbonisation investments. The effect is most significant in carbon-intensive industries and for Scope 1 emissions following the Paris Agreement.
Understanding inequality as a macro-financial risk to markets and diversified portfolios
This research identifies economic inequality as a systemic macro-financial risk to markets. It examines how wealth concentration and market power destabilise economies, fuel social instability, and hinder progress on global challenges. The report advocates for new financial analysis tools and disclosure frameworks to integrate social-related risks into investment strategies.
