TCFD and IFRS -aligned Sustainability Governance
Minerva adds value to your voting strategy with material ESG and Climate Change metrics. Have your Say on Sustainability with timely data, research and customised voting guidelines, fully backed by international regulatory frameworks such as IFRS, TCFD and TPI.
ESG & Sustainability Governance
Understanding how investee companies are addressing key ESG risks and opportunities is to identifying of portfolio leaders and laggards. The Minerva Sustainability Governance framework assesses companies on a transparent and defensible A-F scale based on six pillars of good sustainability and ESG governance disclosure and includes comprehensive data for Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Waste, and Water.
Using public disclosures, the Minerva framework provides critical materiality data to support stewardship across six pillars:
| Disclosure & Transparency | What and where are companies disclosing information? Is there risk recognition, socio-environmental performance data or target-setting? Is data timely and accessible? |
| Management Processes | Who owns sustainability in the firm, who is responsible, how senior? Are management systems disclosed &/or certified? |
| Risk Management | Policies, performance, targets, linkage to executive pay |
| Stakeholder Relations | Suppliers, value perception, staff rewards, charity, political donations |
| Audit & Verification | Assessment standards used, external verification |
| Public Participation | Recognition of initiatives including IFRS, TCFD, Transition Pathway Initiative, CDP, UN Global Compact, GRI, SASB etc. |
ESG and Climate Change Voting
The Minerva Sustainability Score is fully incorporated into shareholder voting policies so that investors can vote to encourage change at companies which fail to disclose their climate change risk management plans.
The underlying data points can also be used to support stewardship screening, index creation and portfolio benchmarking models.
Key Features
While some people talk about big data, Minerva has 25 years expertise in complex ad-hoc financial data management. Minerva’s sustainability data is fully integrated into our highly-regarded governance, director pay and biographical data, AGM vote results and key performance/risk indicator time series.
- ~9000 global companies growing all the time
- Actual data, not estimates or questionnaires
- Available via Bloomberg ESG platform
- Data to support the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD)International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation (IFRS) and the Transition Pathway Initiative
- Support for the Association of Member Nominated Trustees Red Lines Voting initiative
- Custom voting guidelines for asset managers and pension funds
- Incorporate GHG disclosures and reduction targets to monitor progression and integration with pay and reward
- Five year time-series CSV/JSON data set
- Custom benchmarks and quant strategies in partnership with Solactive.
What do sustainability leaders think of Minerva’s research?
Commenting on the publication of a recent review, Bob Eccles, founding chairman of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board said: ” ‘Say on Sustainability” is a carefully done and important action-oriented research project. While it notes some modest progress in sustainability disclosures by some of the world’s largest companies, it also points out some very specific areas where improvements are needed such as in quality through standardized metrics, timeliness with financial reporting, more explicit linkages between financial and non-financial performance, and materiality determination. The latter ultimately rests with the board. Here too the report notes progress but areas where corporate governance needs to be improved. Manifest rightly points out that boards have a fiduciary duty to the company, not only to shareholders. This means they need to identity the significant audiences to the company which is the basis of determining materiality for reporting purposes. I suggest that this be done on an annual basis through a simple one-page board of directors ‘Statement of Significant Audiences and Materiality.’ This modest suggestion will lead to big improvements in all the key areas this report discusses.”
Minerva is a signatory to the UK Stewardship Code 2020, which establishes best practice standards for Asset Managers, Asset Owners, and Service Providers to enhance transparency. You can access our latest report here.
Find out more
To find out more about how you can have a Say on Sustainability please complete the form below and we will be in touch.