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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Thriving workplaces: How employers can improve productivity and change lives
World Economic Forum report examining how employer investment in employee health and well-being improves productivity, retention and economic value. It analyses global workforce health data, identifies demographic disparities in burn-out and holistic health, and proposes measurement frameworks and organisational strategies to build healthier, more productive workplaces.
Production and externalities: How corporate governance shapes social costs
This working paper examines how corporate governance structures influence firms’ production decisions and associated negative externalities. Using a principal–agent model and empirical analysis, the authors show that costly managerial monitoring encourages performance-based pay, which can incentivise practices that increase socially costly production and broader social costs.
Turning the tide: How to finance a sustainable ocean recovery
This report provides guidance for financial institutions on financing a sustainable blue economy. It outlines principles, sector-specific criteria and case studies to support responsible investment in ocean-related sectors including seafood, ports, maritime transport, marine renewable energy and coastal tourism, aligning finance with ocean protection and long-term economic sustainability.
Net zero roadmap for copper and nickel
This report outlines a roadmap for achieving net-zero emissions in copper and nickel mining by 2050. It analyses demand growth from the energy transition and proposes emissions reductions of ~50% by 2030 and ~90% by 2050 through renewable energy, electrification, efficiency improvements, and limited carbon removal offsets.
Sustainable Finance Roundup February 2026: Disclosure, Carbon Trade, and Transition Economics
This month’s sustainability roundup traces a rapidly evolving landscape in climate governance and industrial transition, highlighting the convergence of ISSB-aligned disclosure standards and emerging carbon trade measures alongside shifting cost curves in transport and critical minerals. It underscores how tighter emissions accounting and border policies are embedding carbon competitiveness into capital allocation, while advances in electrification, AI-driven power demand and expanding legal accountability are integrating climate and nature risk into mainstream financial decision-making.
Building consensus on societal wellbeing: A semantic synthesis of indicators to move beyond GDP
Analyses 213 wellbeing indicators using semantic modelling to identify conceptual overlap and optimal design beyond GDP. Finds strong thematic convergence and diminishing returns beyond roughly 20 components. Proposes a synthesised 20-component indicator to support international consensus on measuring sustainable and inclusive wellbeing.
Total Impact Portfolio: Constructing an investment portfolio with an impact lens
This guide outlines constructing a Total Impact Portfolio (TIP), integrating risk, return and impact across all asset classes. It explains double materiality, portfolio design steps, responsible investment strategies, measurement frameworks and barriers. Case studies illustrate Australian and international asset owners embedding impact within governance, allocation and performance management.
Restoring human progress: Winning citizens’ support for actions on climate and nature
This report argues that despite widespread concern about climate and nature, durable policy support depends on restoring belief in human progress. Drawing on surveys and literature, it proposes three principles: deliver meaningful sectoral gains, play to national strengths, and make progress visible to build optimism, agency and sustained public backing.
PerilScope: Strategic Deep Dive Copernicus Global Climate Highlights 2025 — From Records to Operating Conditions in the 3°C World SRP® Frame
The article interprets Copernicus’s Global Climate Highlights 2025 as a shift from episodic extremes to a structurally warmer, more volatile baseline. It argues that persistent temperature exceedances, ocean heat, cryosphere decline, and overlapping hazards demand a move from climate risk awareness to disciplined adaptation and continuity planning.
The Three Horizons of Decarbonisation
This article presents the Three Horizons of Decarbonisation framework, helping companies distinguish between short-term efficiency measures, operational transformation, and fundamental business model shifts. It explains how clear horizon identification improves capital allocation, stakeholder engagement, and the likelihood that net zero plans translate into meaningful action.
Global cybersecurity outlook 2026: Insight report
Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 examines AI-driven threats, geopolitical volatility and supply chain vulnerabilities shaping cyber risk. Drawing on a global survey, it highlights rising AI-related risks, escalating cyber-enabled fraud, regulatory fragmentation and persistent skills shortages, emphasising resilience, ecosystem collaboration and economic impacts as strategic priorities.
Invisible barriers: How gender norms impact financial inclusion A framework for classifying norms and developing strategies to address them
This CGAP Focus Note presents a framework classifying gender norms by strength and prevalence to address barriers to women’s financial inclusion. Drawing on diagnostics in Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, it outlines four intervention strategies for development and market actors to transform financial systems and advance women’s economic empowerment.
Systems-informed stewardship: Reimagining investment stewardship for a sustainable future series
This series sets out a systems-informed framework for reimagining investment stewardship. It examines stewardship as an interconnected system shaped by policies, practices, resource flows, relationships, power dynamics and mental models, and proposes practical shifts to embed responsibility, design for complexity, and manage for long-term sustainability outcomes.
Systems-informed stewardship part III: Reimagining stewardship for a sustainable future
This article presents systems-informed stewardship as a new approach to advancing sustainability across the finance sector. It outlines two interdependent lenses and three practical shifts, embedding responsibility, designing for complexity, and managing adaptively to improve stewardship effectiveness.
The production gap series
This benchmark series examines the gap between governments’ planned fossil fuel production and pathways consistent with international climate goals. It assesses alignment with temperature limits by reviewing national production plans and policy signals, providing a consistent framework to track progress and comparability across editions.
Frozen gas, boiling planet: How bank and investor support for LNG is fueling a climate disaster
The report analyses bank and investor financing of LNG expansion, finding US$213 billion in bank support and US$252 billion in investor exposure since 2021. It concludes this financing drives overcapacity, climate risk and misalignment with 1.5 °C pathways.