McGill SGI OSF & McGill Business Law Platform Fall Conference: Sustainable Finance and ESG From Policy Concerns to Transformative Tools

Friday 24 November 2023 - Desautels Faculty of Management, Ï㽶ÊÓƵ

Hosted by Professor Peer Zumbansen, McGill Faculty of Law

Academic Lead, SGI CIBC Office of Sustainable Finance

CONFERENCE REPORT

THE DRIVING QUESTIONS

Are we making any meaningful headway in the pursuit of a just and green transition? Given the enormity of the challenge, how are we to measure success, how are we to assess impact? Which are the most important types of interventions that ought to be pursued, and which ones should we focus on, invest in, strengthen? Who is in the driver’s seat?

Such questions – and their competing answers – point to the complexity and to the scale of the challenges we are facing. The policy goals of ESG and sustainable finance continue to shape a landscape which is seemingly without peak or centre. On the one hand, international and domestic political interventions are made up of fiscal instruments such as carbon pricing and emissions trading systems (ETS) and transparency-focused interventions, which address a wide range of financial and non-financial reporting obligations. Meanwhile, there has been emerging an almost impossible to map and decipher universe of industry and company-internal elaborations of organizational, reporting and investment-related standards, monitoring and compliance systems.

Amidst this ever-accelerating assemblage of activities, it is increasingly difficult to assess the direction towards we are heading with these efforts. We need to ask ourselves whether, induced by the immediate urgency of the problem of planetary harm, we make too little time for inter-disciplinary and inclusive reflection.

The inaugural ESG/ Sustainable Finance Fall 2023 Conference brings together experts in sustainable corporate governance, management and finance, in responsible investment consulting and civil society sustainability advocacy and policy making. The aspiration is to engage in a day-long conversation about these challenges by focusing on three concrete spaces of organizational and conceptual transformation. The Conference is hosted by the CIBC Office of Sustainable Finance under the Auspices of McGill’s Sustainable Growth Initiative (SGI). The SGI is an inter-departmental and interdisciplinary research, knowledge generation and outreach program designed to facilitate impactful collaboration between University members and industry partners, public institutions, NGOs and other civil society actors.

Our Conference aims at providing the space for a deep and engaged dialogue on how to effectively advance on ESG and sustainability goals and how to best coordinate public and private activities in that regard. Realizing that climate change is a societal problem, the responsibility lies with governments and markets, with citizens, consumers, corporations, with regulatory and quasi-regulatory agencies, with all of us. Our Fall Conference is the first in a series of events meant to facilitate a long-term dialogue that allows for a cross-sectional stock-taking of learned lessons – what works, what doesn’t, and why? - and for the exploration of concrete steps that can be taken in the public and private sector and in coordination between both.