Stock exchanges have been catching up with growing investor demands, and a total of 63 venues are now offering written guidance to their listed companies on how to best disclose environmental, social and governance (ESG) data, according to the UN-backed Sustainable Stock Exchanges initiative. The group accounts for more than 44,000 listed companies and nearly $82tn in domestic market capitalisation, including the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, which introduced guidelines in 2021 and 2019, respectively, as well as the London Stock Exchange and Euronext operations. Interestingly, the first bourse to introduce written guidance was Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SSE) in 2006, says the SSE.
Numbers have been growing rapidly: 20 bourses offered ESG guidance five years ago, up from just two in 2011. However, today’s total is only about half of the exchanges monitored by the SSE, as HSBC points out in a research note, suggesting that others may soon follow thanks to greater regulatory attention to this space across the world.
