Investing for the future
Applying sustainability principles to investment decisions makes sense if you want to invest with the future in mind. It also helps create a sustainable economy now.
EIRIS research focuses on the four pillars of corporate sustainability: environmental, social, governance and other ethical concerns. We believe that only by addressing these issues can company activity become truly sustainable. EIRIS also believes that acting in a sustainable way will help companies to generate long term value for their shareholders.
When analysing a company we research a wide variety of sustainability criteria including impact upon biodiversity, labour issues in the supply chain, approaches to tackling corruption, chemicals of concern and deforestation.
EIRIS also assesses the specific sustainability challenges that may derive from a company’s products or services. In particular, those products that may have health implications such as alcohol and tobacco or products whose inherent nature may be a cause for concern, for example cluster munitions or project finance.
Our approach analyses a company’s public commitment, management response, disclosure and performance on a particular issue. This measures the extent to which companies are managing the risks and capturing the opportunities that the changing landscape of sustainability issues presents. The materiality of issues is indicated with an assessment of risk or impact weighting for that company.
A key part of EIRIS research is the assessment of whether a company’s performance is improving or deteriorating. Providing this type of trend analysis allows investors to assess a company’s ongoing progress on sustainability issues.
Companies do not report in a uniform way so EIRIS researchers need to use their expertise to produce data that is comparable. An example of this is collating the variety of information that companies provide on carbon emissions to calculate each company’s annual average reduction rate for those emissions.
EIRIS research is developed through a stakeholder process that takes into account the views of investors, NGOs, academics and companies. This approach, combined with the transparency of our methodology and the expertise of EIRIS researchers results in a robust and detailed assessment of company sustainability.
