Should you have missed the NYU Stern’s Center for Sustainable Business research on the environmental, social and governance (ESG) credentials of board directors, we’ve put together a neat summary of its striking findings. And should you have read the report, you may still find its visual representation rather punchy.
It turns out that board members of some of the US’s largest companies do not have much to show when it comes to sustainability. NYU Stern looked into the biographies of the 1188 directors sitting on Fortune 100 companies’ boards, as they appeared on Bloomberg and corporate sources in 2019, and found that only 29% had some ESG credentials. Not bad, you say, for a relatively new area? Well, as the report’s authors point out, looking at the individual components of the three categories forming ESG paints a less rosy picture.
0.3% of board directors have experience in ethics or corporate responsibility
The majority of skills come from the ‘social’ category, the S, with 21% of total, while the E and the G account for only 6% each. (Some directors have experiece in more than one area, which explains the 29% total). With climate change such a pressing concern, that 6% looks rather worrying.
A deeper dive reveals even more uncomfortable ratios. The most populous individual credential group is workplace diversity: only 5% of the total. While only 1.2% of board directors have experience in the energy sector, only 1.1% count on credentials in economic or community development, and a nearly nonexistent 0.3% in ethics or corporate responsibility.
