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Sustainability and Share Performance – a Long-Running Debate Revisited
Publisher
Bank Sarasin & Co
Publication date
November 2008
Type
Reports
Category
SRI/Sustainable Finance
Sustainability and the Business Case
Sustainability and the Business Case
Discipline
Organisational Behaviour
Language
English
Free/Pay for content
Free
The results of the report can be summarised as follows:
- Sustainability does not compromise financial performance: The current investigation confirms the findings of the majority of studies published on this topic: sustainability does not have a negative impact on the financial performance of share portfolios. It also refutes the argument that environmental and social initiatives adopted voluntarily by companies are incompatible with market rules and tend to destroy value.
- Sustainability makes a positive contribution to performance in certain cases: On the contrary, there is much evidence to suggest that many environmental and social impacts pose latent risks to companies in the long run. More sustainable businesses can avoid these risks and even exploit the opportunities they present. This report thus reaffirms the findings of other reports which have shown that sustainability tends to have a positive impact on share performance. The positive influence is concentrated especially on the company rating component of Sarasin’s sustainability analysis, but its strength varies depending on which ratings, time frames and regions are analysed – and in some cases is not actually significant.
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