Track Records and Insights

The Chinese and UK governments, at the 9th UK–China Economic and Financial Dialogue held on 15 December 2017, agreed to strengthen green finance cooperation and encouraged financial institutions of the two countries to jointly pilot climate and environmental information disclosure. The pilot is a four-year initiative, including one year of preparation and three years of action. 2019 was the second year of the pilot. The following passage is going to show the progress and main goals of the pilot.

In the point of view of how the pandemic impacts climate, this passage is going to assess and recommend on how companies can apply ESG mindset to achieve sustainable development in the Post-COVID-19 world.

The huge slap of this COVID-19 epidemic on most enterprises made it hard for us to imagine how the aftermath and indirect impacts of the disaster will change the socio-economic structure and business development models. In the post-pandemic era, how to cumulate the experience from setbacks and use the brand new financial values and management system called‘ESG’to empower corporate sustainability development will be a new trend of global development.

With the increasing attention on the “informed market”, ESG information becomes more and more important to investors, who see an organised package of non-financial performance of companies as a powerful auxiliary tool-kit for analysis in making investment decisions. Providing sufficient ESG information not only informs investors in decision-making, but also allows them to gain confidence about the business development of a company in the long-term prospect.

Business and climate change have mutual impacts on each other. Business influences climate change with climate-related reporting today laying more emphasis on different business models’ carbon footprint while climate change does sway business models to some extent with the reporting promoted by Task Force on Climate-related financial disclosures (TCFD) focusing on financial implications of climate change on business models.

Content development is the stage of transformation where all the materials and data being collected turn into the actual report that is being presented. It is, however, more than just a “writing-up”, but an on-going process of narrative development [...]

Data collection is a very time-consuming activity and requires collaborative efforts. It should be a customised and unique process for the organisation and therefore remains a fairly flexible element in the sustainability reporting process. Therefore, there is no strict [...]

According to the GRI standards, the sustainability report shall cover topics that: Reflect the reporting organisation’s significant economic, environmental, and social impacts; or Substantively influence the assessments and decisions of stakeholders. Materiality assessment helps the reporting entity to identify [...]

Stakeholder engagement, as a method to obtain stakeholder’s opinions and focus areas, is an essential part of preparing the sustainability report under the GRI framework, which could assist companies to establish the sustainability strategies that suit own development models [...]

GRI standards provide companies with a flexible and future-proof reporting structure, that is, the forward-looking and rigorous approach advocated by GRI ensures its process and topics can always remain up-to-date and relevant.