ESG investing

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates again on May 3, 2023, by a quarter point, making it the Fed’s 10th rate hike since March 2022 in an ongoing fight to tame inflation. These rate hikes have been reverberating through the economy, raising prospects of a recession amid heightened concerns about the fragile state of banks. The rate hikes are also rattling sustainability-focused investing, better known as ESG investing. The trend toward ESG investing, which puts pressure on companies to meet environmental, social and governance benchmarks, has almost redefined asset management over the past decade. ESG funds today are a multitrillion-dollar market. However, the high uncertainty around interest rates today, along with the prospects of a looming recession and a political backlash, has put the future of ESG investors at a crossroads. I specialize in sustainable finance, and my recent work has documented the impact that tough economic times can have on ESG investing dema...

To meet today’s global sustainability challenges, the corporate world needs more than a few chief sustainability officers – it needs an army of employees, in all areas of business, thinking about sustainability in their decisions every day. That means product designers, supply managers, economists, scientists, architects and many others with the knowledge to both recognize unsustainable practices and find ways to improve sustainability for the overall health of their companies and the planet. Employers are increasingly looking for those skills. We analyzed job ads from a global database and found a tenfold increase in the number of jobs with “sustainability” in the title over the last decade, reaching 177,000 in 2021. What’s troubling is that there are not enough skilled workers to meet the rapid growth in green and sustainability jobs available. While the number of “green jobs” grew globally at a rate of 8% per year over the last five...