This week, Richard Howitt welcomes Robert McCorquodale, professor of international law and human rights and current chair of the United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights, to discuss their report presented last month to the 56th Human Rights Council on investor responsibility to respect human rights. You can read a summary of the report here.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• ESG is not the same as human rights: there must be a systematic integration or the consideration of human rights in relation to ESG
• How investors should and can prevent 'rightswashing'
• A call for the EU to look again in two years at including investment in the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD)
• While soft law holds significant importance, it is the amendment of hard law that ultimately brings about substantial and concrete change

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Germany's NewClimate Institute has produced the Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor, evaluating the transparency and integrity of climate pledges of 51 major companies across different sectors and geographies.

Richard Howitt welcomes Frederic Hans and Thomas Day, co-authors of the report to discuss their findings and key recommendations to companies in their journey to net-zero.

In this episode, you’ll find more about:

• Good business practices and what makes a business leader in climate action efforts

• Checklist of things to avoid if companies want to try and do this better

• If the ESRS and ISSB Standards are improving things and if companies can feel confident in following them?

• The need for science-based targets and what SBTi should do next

• What is green hushing and to what extent it can be dangerous

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In this week’s episode, Richard Howitt asks: can we believe the numbers on environment, social and governance (ESG)?

To address this, we welcome Richard Hardyment, author of Measuring Good Business: Making Sense of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Data. In it, he states that there is little or no evidence that ESG has and has had any positive outcomes for people and the planet in the real world. And yet he calls himself emphatically pro-sustainability.

After directing research at the World Benchmarking Alliance, he is now Head of Business Engagement at the Institute of Business Ethics.

In this episode, you’ll hear more about:

• The secret about sustainability reporting numbers
• The different ways in measuring social and environmental disclosures
• What makes a good proxy?
• How to pick up context in sustainability reporting?
• Can we measure the goodwill of the business?

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