Dive Brief:
- Bloomberg launched an enterprise tool Monday that will allow investors to assess corporations’ impacts on the United Nations’ sustainable development goals through a data mapping platform, which the company said is the first to align with the UN societal blueprint.
- The UN’s member states adopted the 17 SDGs in 2015, including gender equality, reduced inequalities and affordable and clean energy.
- The UN Environmental Programme Finance Initiative Sector Impact Map will provide more clarity for investors seeking to direct capital toward sustainable assets and assess how private sector activities are aligning with the SDGs.
Dive Insight:
Bloomberg’s data mapping and materiality assessment tool will give investors information on more than 500 sectoral activities mapped to 38 topics to assess impact, in addition to the SDGs, to discern the effects corporations have on the environment, people and economic development.
By providing insights into how companies’ operations impact the 2030 sustainable agenda, Bloomberg hopes to bridge a gap between ESG integration and impact investing, according to Patricia Torres, global head of sustainable finance solutions. UNEP FI Program Lead, Careen Abb, said the tool will also help make impact analysis mainstream for the financial industry, and “accelerate the transition to an economy that helps deliver the SDGs.”
The UN released its most recent SDG implementation update in July, which found implementation progress for more than half of the goals were “weak and insufficient” and 30% of targets have seen progress either stall or regress.
“Unless we act now, the 2030 Agenda could become an epitaph for a world that might have been,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in the report’s foreword.
Guterres said that global governments are far from delivering on a 2020 pledge to invest $100 billion annually in climate and urged the international community to reform its financial architecture to ensure that the benefits of a globalized economy are equitably shared. The UN has estimated a $2.5-$3 trillion annual funding gap needs to be closed for developing countries, if the 2030 goals are going to be met.
This new data mapping tool joins Bloomberg’s growing suite of ESG products, which includes sustainable debt instruments, climate risk exposure indicators, companies’ carbon emissions datasets and more. Last month, Bloomberg and Riskthinking.AI launched an artificial intelligence tool that will help businesses predict their financial exposure to climate change. That tool aligns its data with all the climate change scenarios laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
