Dear Friends and Colleagues of IMAP: 

We appreciate your involvement with IMAP as we continue to grow our program. Turns out, 2023 was a busy year.

It was great seeing many of you in-person during our annual October fall workshop on evolving ESG disclosure requirements. See our main takeaways below and be sure to save the date for our 2024 fall workshop on Friday, October 18.

The number of research projects we have running continues to grow. View our full list of active projects on our website and see below for recent publications. Our latest reports include mapping palm oil deforestation to suppliers and commentary on newly released fossil fuel disclosures as they relate to methane.

Thanks to Debora joining our team to take the lead on our marketing and communications, you've started to see outputs from IMAP shared more frequently. You can now follow our LinkedIn page and view video recordings of our monthly lunch seminars. Please reshare the posts that you like with your network!

Our next lunch seminar is scheduled for Thursday, January 25 and will focus on ethical considerations regarding the G in ESG. We hope you'll join us either online or in person.

Thank you for your support and happy holidays,

Susan Fredholm Murphy

For our 2023 IMAP Fall Workshop, investors, academics, researchers, and corporate leaders gathered to discuss the Promises and Perils of ESG Disclosures. Thanks to all who joined us on October 13!

Our Panelists:

Our featured panelists this year were: Geeta Aiyer, President and Founder of Boston Common Asset Management; Faten Freiha, Vice President, Investor Relations at McCormick; Eric Pedersen, Leader of Nordea Asset Management’s Responsible Investments Team; and Dr. Eddie Riedl, John Smith Jr. Professor of Management at the Boston University Questrom School of Business.

Format:

After a lively conversation among our panelists, we split into smaller breakout groups so that everyone in the room could be an active part of the discussion. See below for a short summary of the discussions that day and visit our website for more details.

Summary:

ESG disclosures currently reflect highly varied firm and industry approaches and are rapidly evolving. It seems likely that the current diversity in practice will slowly coalesce into more standardized reporting, consistent with major inflection points in disclosure/reporting regimes seen in past decades. Initial challenges in measuring key ESG attributes should not excuse the much-needed ongoing development of these metrics. There are likely benefits to continued standardization of ESG disclosures, to both level the playing field and enhance comparability across firms. Top firms already have high awareness of key ESG topics affecting their business and are taking proactive steps to disclose high quality information regarding them. This includes an evolving view that ESG and financial reporting are not distinct, but rather complementary ways of presenting key information regarding the firm and its performance. There is likely a useful role for strong regulators/attestation to ensure implementation that is uniform and high quality, as ESG disclosure regulation continues to evolve. 

Our 2024 Fall Workshop will be held on Friday, October 18, 8 am - 1 pm, on BU's campus. Please save the date!

Our monthly lunch seminars offer a forum for academics and industry professionals to learn about and discuss new research or practices. You can attend either in person or online. Videos of most of the talks are available online. Here are our upcoming talks:

Who does not care loses:

Ethical governance and the bottom line

Thursday, January 25

In the ESG arena, the E is getting the majority of the attention, and the S closely follows, while the G, even though holding the key to the E and the S, comes almost as an afterthought. BU MET College Professor of Finance Irena Vodenska will talk about her research into the relationship between corporate governance factors and firm performance and risk, focusing on financial considerations, board characteristics, and adherence to governance principles. Register for this lunch.

Do or Do Not, There Is No Try:

Managing and Mitigating Sociopolitical Firm Risk Events

Thursday, February 15

Remember Gillette's "The Best Men Can Be" campaign? Launching weeks before that year's Super Bowl, it encouraged men to use their voices and actions to end bullying, harassment, and violence. The public backlash to this ad is an example of a sociopolitical (SP) event for Gillette.

This research focuses on the impact of sociopolitical (SP) events on business. Firms are increasingly concerned about mitigating the harm of SP firm risk events, with a focus on enhancing outcomes for profits, stakeholder relationships, and firm value. Join us for a discussion of the work by Questrom team Chen Jing, Dokyun Lee, Shuba Srinivasan, and Susan Fournier, talking about their research investigating the impact of SP firm risk events on stakeholders’ reactions on social media and firm value and explore strategies to mitigate potential downsides. Register for this lunch.

Pharmaceutical Industry Reporting on Access

Thursday, March 21

The pharmaceutical industry plays an important role in the global effort to achieve universal health coverage (UHC) and companies have invested substantially in access partnerships in low- and middle-income countries. Companies are currently being presented with an uncoordinated set of requests from stakeholders, including investors and global institutions, for information and data related to access activities and performance, often with ambiguous expectations around what good performance looks like. BU Associate Professor of Public Health Peter Rockers will talk about his efforts to convene stakeholders in a process whose goal is to align on a small set of simple, pragmatic metrics and clearer expectations. Register for this lunch.

In September, we hosted Earth and Environment PhD Candidate Alicia Zhang, who talked about her latest research in the Corporate Carbon Risk project, creating a model to predict whether or not a utility will meet its emissions targets. Look for an online interactive model with this data soon! You can see Alicia's talk here.

We hosted Aliya Korganbekova from BU's accounting department in November. She presented her research on the effects of state-level greenhouse gas emissions regulations.

And most recently, Keith Ericson presented his research on how shareholders want corporations to balance financial returns with ESG objectives at our December luncheon.

IMAP hosted the November Research on Tap, sponsored by BU's Office of Research. Seven BU researchers gave short talks on their research related to the topic of measuring corporate impacts on the environment and society. Check out the summary here.

Suchi Gopal, Professor of Earth & Environment, has a paper in IEEE Explore about her work correlating palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia with local deforestation. You can read the working paper here.

Columbia University Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and IMAP Senior Fellow, Robert Kleinberg, has written a paper on the environmental scoring of methane for foreign trade and investment decisions. Read it here.

Alicia Zhang, PhD Candidate, presented her research at the North American Meeting of the Regional Science Association International conference and shared her thoughts about what she learned here.

Boston University's Impact Measurement and Allocation Program was founded thanks to generous donations to the University by those who want to see improvements in the ESG data made available to financial investors. We are a joint venture of the Questrom School of Business and the university-wide Institute for Global Sustainability. Our ties to both of these Institutes allow us to leverage interdisciplinary teams to solve current business challenges.

We are furthermore aided in our mission to produce impactful research via our Advisory Board of industry leaders. To contribute to our program or learn more about it, please email sfmurphy@bu.edu.

Our mailing address is:

Boston University

Institute For Global Sustainability

180E Riverway, 2nd Floor

Boston, MA 02215-4109

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