Sustainability Reporting Frameworks

A Guide for CIOs

Over the past two decades, sustainability reporting frameworks have proliferated around the world, aiming to improve company transparency and comparability on environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices relevant to investors and, to a varying extent, other stakeholders. This report focuses on four of the most commonly cited ESG reporting frameworks: the Climate Disclosure Project (CDP), the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) and the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). The report provides chief investment officers (CIOs) of U.S. pension funds and investors more generally a basic understanding of the frameworks and their fundamental differences.

As investors increasingly coalesce around the notion that ESG factors can influence long-term financial performance, demand has grown for ESG information that is useful to investment decision-making, proxy voting, engagement or a combination of all three.