More and more companies are adopting an Esg perspective. “Behind these three concepts, environment, social and governance, is the distillation of what a company needs to do to meet today’s challenges and build a business structure capable of designing its production processes in a way that saves energy, raw materials and protects the environment, invest in its people and territory, and equip itself with management tools that ensure flexibility and adaptive capacity. And the data tell us that two-thirds of entrepreneurs have begun to see economic benefits in applying these three factors in the company’s core,” says Elio Catania president of Innovatec, host of the second day of Green Week in Parma, the green economy festival, promoted by ItalyPost with Fondazione Symbola and Corriere.
“Companies are beginning to look at this issue not as a cost but as an investment, because they have realized that sustainability creates value and increases profit,” confirms Francesco Perrini, pro-rector of sustainability at Bocconi University. The policy push on this issue, at a time of elections in Europe and the United States and great geopolitical uncertainty, seems to be slowing down. In the U.S. context, in particular, there is a kind of “Esg populism” that is spreading among Republicans, even to the borderline case of New Hampshire where they have introduced a bill to make green investing a crime. “This causes some players, such as Blackrock, after pushing hard on the sustainability issue, to decide to exit the Net Zero banking alliance (the UN-sponsored initiative aimed at accelerating the sustainable transition of the banking sector, ed.). However, for three or four exits, there were 60 new entrants. This tells us investors who do sustainability continue to grow, despite some attempts to backtrack,” Perrini continues. Today they account for 30-34% of the market, but by 2030 it is estimated to be 70%. This means that in six years an unsustainable company can be financed by only 30 percent of investors. Those green ones from the ‘whole market. Finance is being asked to be a driving force to accelerate the transition. “In this context, the bank must maintain a balanced vision and accompany companies toward sustainability, framing the company in an ecosystem in which it operates,” adds Marco Perocchi, head of the Corporate Banking Department Crédit Agricole Italia. “At the same time, entrepreneurs, from their privileged observatory on consumers, are increasingly realizing the opportunities that lie behind this challenge of Esg goals.
Despite this, many continue to see it as a compliance issue, highlight Stefania Petruccioli and Alessandro Damiano of 21 Invest, the European investment group founded by Alessandro Benetton. One of the difficulties is measuring the Esg performance of companies: in Europe alone there are 160 different scoring. The good news is that as of this year there are mandatory European standards for sustainability reporting that the United States and China are also aligning with. “China has been studying EU standards for five years, and starting next year Chinese listed companies will have to follow a similar system,” Perrini concludes. “This alignment will allow comparisons to be made over time and space. Which is very difficult today.”