Valuing Corporate Responsibility

"Investors have taken a long time to pay attention to corporate responsibility. Despite the growing number of companies that were taking action to manage the social and environmental impacts of their activities and operations and that were reporting on their corporate responsibility performance, mainstream investors' interest in governance issues was, on the whole, piqued only in those situations where a major accident or scandal hit the headlines. This has changed dramatically. With over 600 large investment institutions, including asset managers, insurance companies and pension funds having signed the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment, it can now be plausibly argued that "responsible investment" has become mainstream. This change is potentially of huge significance, and the investment community is now widely seen as one of the key audiences for the thousands of corporate responsibility reports produced each year. Yet the reality is that there is a striking lack of understanding among companies of investors' interests. The consequence has been that, despite many companies identifying investors as one of the critical audiences for their corporate responsibility report