The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) develops industry-focused standards that help public corporations disclose material, decision-useful sustainability information to investors. The sustainability accounting standards are developed through a rigorous, evidence-based stakeholder process and identify material environmental, social, and governance issues and key performance indicators for 79 industries in 10 sectors. Jean Rogers, the CEO of SASB, spoke at the 2015 Boston Security Analysts Society Sustainable Investing Seminar, providing a detailed update on SASB’s progress. In this interview following her presentation, Jean Rogers discussed the following topics:
- Why choose industry-focused standards?
- The process for creating the standards
- The current status of the standards
- How metrics are selected for the standards
- How investment professionals can get started using SASB information
- Recently published research applying the standards has uncovered cross-cutting risk themes with portfolio-wide impacts; for example, climate risk is a large source of undiversifiable risk that is present in 72 of 79 industries, representing 93% of market value
- How material sustainability disclosure helps analysts and investors in their work
- What we are learning about the current state of sustainability disclosure
- New research that demonstrates the value of looking at material sustainability factors
- What makes these material sustainability metrics different from what has previously been available