The Financial Upside of Sustainability: Alka Bhide Explains How

My understanding is there's increasing pressure to tie sustainability investments to financial outcomes, especially it could be your institutional clients, or as you said, it could be operators.

How do, how does financial materiality interplay with sustainability, and why is it so important to show that bottom line, line benefit when implementing a climate strategy?

strategy?Absolutely.

So in challenging financial times like this, I think a lot of industries are looking at, like, climate as something that's a negative cost center to them.

And what we really want to show is that climate can be a positive opportunity if they invest-

Mm-hmm

...

in the right way, and if they use their existing investments and really follow up on them, and give them the appropriate talent and time and compensation to really make sure that they're-

Mm-hmm

... engaging with other parts of the business to drive value from their past investments, as well as starting to look at their future investments with what was a proven, uh, success, and what needs to really move forward in order to compete with other industry players.

And I think so often of the time we're, like, seeing climate-

Mm-hmm

...

when it's looking at this negative risk side of things.

We are looking at it, well, now I need to spend money on disclosure, now I need to spend money on, on these new initiatives, now I need to create all of this branding and this marketing.

Right.

But what we are trying to push is that things that really deliver positive financial materiality and positive value to the business, when you are increasing disclosure, yes, that is a cost that you are doing, but you are increasing transparency in your business.

You are making it clear to the stakeholders within and external to your business what you're doing, and providing this level of accountability that is-

Mm-hmm

... incredibly critical to any business, regardless of if they're invested in cl- or not.

And when you're thinking about things where you are looking at your external focus, no company should be greenwashing any way and just saying things for the sake of we want to say that we're doing climate-friendly-

Right

... things.

So we often feel that by looking at the financial materiality and how well you're executing on the strategy that you've set out, it really prevents companies from doing this greenwashing and-

Mm-hmm

My understanding is there's increasing pressure to tie sustainability investments to financial outcomes, especially it could be your institutional clients, or as you said, it could be operators.

How do, how does financial materiality interplay with sustainability, and why is it so important to show that bottom line, line benefit when implementing a climate strategy?

strategy?Absolutely.

So in challenging financial times like this, I think a lot of industries are looking at, like, climate as something that's a negative cost center to them.

And what we really want to show is that climate can be a positive opportunity if they invest-

Mm-hmm

...

in the right way, and if they use their existing investments and really follow up on them, and give them the appropriate talent and time and compensation to really make sure that they're-

Mm-hmm

... engaging with other parts of the business to drive value from their past investments, as well as starting to look at their future investments with what was a proven, uh, success, and what needs to really move forward in order to compete with other industry players.

And I think so often of the time we're, like, seeing climate-

Mm-hmm

...

when it's looking at this negative risk side of things.

We are looking at it, well, now I need to spend money on disclosure, now I need to spend money on, on these new initiatives, now I need to create all of this branding and this marketing.

Right.

But what we are trying to push is that things that really deliver positive financial materiality and positive value to the business, when you are increasing disclosure, yes, that is a cost that you are doing, but you are increasing transparency in your business.

You are making it clear to the stakeholders within and external to your business what you're doing, and providing this level of accountability that is-

Mm-hmm

... incredibly critical to any business, regardless of if they're invested in cl- or not.

And when you're thinking about things where you are looking at your external focus, no company should be greenwashing any way and just saying things for the sake of we want to say that we're doing climate-friendly-

Right

... things.

So we often feel that by looking at the financial materiality and how well you're executing on the strategy that you've set out, it really prevents companies from doing this greenwashing and-

Mm-hmm