As we reported this autumn at COP26 in Glasgow and at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore, sustainability has risen to the top of the agenda for business leaders around the world in 2021.
As we move into 2022, it has become clear that much of the new momentum in the green revolution will be funded by capital markets and banks. The impact is being felt in every sector and industry, with an estimated US $26 trillion in economic gains at stake.
Data from the Bloomberg Brand Accelerator, which measures perceptions among global corporate decision-makers, confirms that 99% of business leaders now consider ESG efforts and the reputation of companies when making decisions on behalf of their own company. And tellingly, outside of the office 98% of executives also consider brand reputations when making personal purchase decisions.
The implication for marketers is significant: demonstrating action matters. When a brand’s actions and messages are connected to real, measurable outcomes, it drives meaningful impact and value, both for customers and for society as a whole.
The big shift to green jobs
As companies fight for talent, a growing number of young people are actively looking for green jobs – and candidates with green skills are being evaluated differently and setting themselves apart. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that 24 million jobs worldwide could be created by the green economy by 2030.
Karin Kimbrough, chief economist at LinkedIn, has highlighted how the shift to hiring for the green economy is already well under way. In 2015, the ratio of US oil and gas jobs to renewable energy or environment-based jobs was 5:1, but by 2020 this ratio had moved to 2:1. At the current rate of green growth, she expects roles in renewables and the environment to outnumber oil and gas on the social platform by 2023, representing a fundamental shift.
It was in this climate that, in the summer of 2020, Bloomberg launched its proprietary ESG scores for more than 4,300 companies across multiple industries. Now that ESG data has become critical to the investment process, we see an opportunity to provide transparent and complete scoring methodologies, along with the underlying data, in order to help investment and finance professionals make informed decisions.
For corporates, these scores offer a valuable, quantitative and normalised benchmark that will easily highlight their ESG performance. Our proprietary model is informed by sustainability and industry frameworks, research and analysis in order to reduce noise, normalise data, and address size bias and disclosure gaps. The resulting ESG scores are fully transparent, enabling investors to examine both the scoring methodology and the reported corporate data underlying each score.
At Bloomberg Media, we are set up to enable our commercial partners to fully understand and harness data-driven insights and trends around sustainability, in order to power impactful communications.
You can watch Bloomberg Media’s ESG video series on the Bloomberg Media blog.
To find out more or explore commercial opportunities with Bloomberg Media, get in touch with our EMEA team.
Europe: Duncan Chater, head of sales, Europe, Bloomberg Media
Middle East and Africa: Amit Nayak, head of sales, Middle East and Africa, Bloomberg Media
