Stockholm (NordSIP) – To meet the targets of the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), financial markets need to improve the understanding and management of the effect of their investments on people and the planet. As was highlighted by Amit Bouri CEO Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) in NordSIP’s latest Impact Investing magazine, one of the crucial components of this process is the establishment of coherent standards and guidance to mainstream impact management.
To address these concerns and disseminate best practices a number of expert organisations came together to form the Impact Management Platform (IMP) in November 2021. The Impact Management Platform is a collaboration between impact organisations to coordinate efforts and mainstream the practice of impact management. The Platform represents the next phase of the collaboration that, until now, was facilitated by the Impact Management Project (IMP), a timebound consensus-building forum that ran from 2016 to 2021.
The Platform is a collaboration between leading providers of public good standards, frameworks, tools, and guidance for managing sustainability impacts. Among others, the partners planning to work together through the Impact Management Platform include the OECD, the Climate Disclosure Project (CDP), the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB), the GIIN, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and the UN Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI). The project is led by Clara Barby, its CEO, Partner at Bridges Fund Management Ltd, and Project lead for the establishment of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) at the IFRS Foundation.
“One of the most significant things we accomplished over the last couple of years was creating and streamlining language to talk about sustainability disclosures. One thing that was really helpful was to clarifying that the concept of sustainability disclosures exists in two dimensions: The disclosure of how sustainability issues impact a business’ value over time and how a company’s management of sustainability issues impact society. That framing was very helpful,” Janine Guillot (Pictured), CEO of the Value Reporting Foundation said during the online launch of the IMP. She noted that there are still two important misconceptions, nevertheless. “First, I often hear people talk about those two concepts as if there is a wall between them. There is not. (…) The other very common misconception that I hear is that the enterprise value lens is only relevant to impacts on the financial accounts or statements.”
The IMP seeks to answer the demand for assistance to help enterprises and investors navigate impact management by building a coherent and complete system of principles, standards and guidance for how to improve sustainability impacts. Through the Platform, partnering organisations will work together to identify opportunities to:
- Continue to clarify the actions of impact management and to actively disseminate relevant frameworks, tools and guidance for each action;
- Achieve, where necessary, consolidation of existing resources to support the practice of impact management, with a focus on advancing and demonstrating interoperability among those resources;
- Identify actions and areas in which insufficient resources are available to support practitioners, and to coordinate to deliver workplans to address this. This includes leveraging a broader community of experts as required; and
- Coordinate among Partners regarding policy and regulatory processes to support the mainstreaming of impact management.
“The world needs ambitious and effective action on climate change. To be truly effective, ambitious climate action needs to be more globally coordinated. There needs to be more alignment across the broad spectrum of public policy, but there also needs to be a much improved alignment between the public and private sectors. The public sector will not be able to reach global net-zero by 2050 on its own. The private sector, and private investors, will necessarily have a major role to play. There needs to be a thorough transformation of the financial system in order to better facilitate the incorporation of long term risks and opportunities [into investor decisions],” Mathias Corman, OECD Secretary General, added.
