The Covid-19 coronavirus crisis has brought into focus the immediate economic priorities for businesses. However, it raises pertinent questions as to where it leaves the environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda for these same companies?

Just as the world business community was finally getting to grips with the ESG agenda, after the shift away following the 2008 recession – will the COVID-19 crisis be characterised by a shift away from ESG priorities? Or, has the crisis reaffirmed the need for businesses to be environmentally and socially sustainable?

As the full effects of the pandemic unfold, what are the trends we are witnessing and what do we foresee for the future? Will the crisis provide a wake-up call for better corporate risk governance? The crisis has made the need for businesses to better understand and manage physical risks urgent. Contingency planning has, for many, focused on areas such as data breaches, security and environmental or health and safety accidents – will this broaden to encapsulate wider risks?

The questions are endless, and the webinar will bring together experts in a thought-provoking panel discussion to discuss the following:
▪ The immediate and long-term impact of COVID-19 on the ESG agenda
▪ Steps businesses can take to map and mitigate physical risks as part of their corporate risk agenda
▪ How to maintain an equilibrium between efficiency, business resilience and long-term sustainability
▪ How to shift the focus from rescue to recovery

What we learnt:

• Evidence is mounting that company performance pertaining to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors contributes to business success, and the speed at which those factors become material to any given business is increasing.
• Therefore, over the past couple of years, there has been an acceleration in the consideration of, if not adoption of ESG factors within business.
• Today business stakeholders and investors are diligently taking ESG considerations into account in the decision-making process surrounding investment decisions.
• Global private equity companies, sovereign wealth funds, and hedge funds have all started to adopt ESG factors as a tool for risk mitigation. ESG metrics have proven to create more robust and resilient companies that can withstand shocks of the pandemic.
• The ESG agenda has not changed with COVID-19, rather the emphasis on ‘social’ and ‘governance’ is coming to the forefront by viewing the way in which risk is being evaluated.
• ESG requirements of investors are currently the main driver of the agenda in the region; organisations find that reporting and disclosing their ESG metrics will shape their sustainability framework and lead to a growth in investor appetite.
• The average ESG score out of 100 has increased over the past three years from 17 to 20 across the Gulf Region:
  – Environment score has gone up from 4 to 5
  – Social score has gone up from 9 to 12
  – Governance score has gone up from 39 to 44
• Companies that have built their resilience and have already embedded ESG priorities into their core business will have the ability to come out of the pandemic less scathed then their counterparts, and will already be in the recovery mode since the ESG lens allows companies to see opportunities that an operational or commercial lens may restrict.