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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We are a few days away from the European elections, and there is a frenzied atmosphere in Brussels for what the results might mean for the future of sustainability in the EU, Europe's Green Deal and for its implications for business.

In this week’s episode, Richard Howitt welcomes Antonia Zimmermann, trade reporter for Politico Europe, which reports on European politics and policy, and Anna Brunetti, experienced financial journalist and economy editor at Euractiv.

This conversation is going to guide you through what's happening and what might happen in the future. Together they discuss:

• What caused the backlash against the Green Deal and the green agenda in Europe?
• If Europe needs to play catch-up when it comes to financing the green transition
• What is the tone of this EU Elections campaign?
• Their predictions on the outcome of the 2024 EU elections
• Despite the risks, the challenges, the fears and the dangers, will climate stay on the agenda in the upcoming mandate?

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In this Frankly Speaking episode, Richard Howitt welcomes MEP Heidi Hautala (Greens/ EFA), vice president of the European Parliament, founder of the EP’s working group for Responsible Business Conduct and former development minister of Finland.

This year, Heidi has declared that she will step down at the forthcoming European elections. As one of the foremost advocates of business and human rights in Europe and a lead campaigner for Europe's new corporate sustainability due diligence law (#CSDDD), who better and what better time to ask Heidi about what has been achieved and what still needs to happen.

A warm thank you to Heidi Hautala not only for coming on the podcast but most importantly for all the work done on the business and human rights agenda in the past 30 years.

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** Note to the listeners: due to technical difficulties, we recommend listening to this episode on Spotify while the audio is being updated on all platforms. Thank you for your patience and for bearing with us while we fix this technical issue.

This week in the podcast, Richard Howitt welcomes one of the leading business voices on supply chain management in the world, Linda Kromjong, president of amfori, Global Business Association and a key advocate of open and sustainable trade in Europe and in the world.

Together they discuss:

• Why is due diligence important for companies?
• Why is the CSDDD a pro-business directive? Why is this good for business?
• An insider view on what happened in the last moments before new and unexpected deals had to be done by Member States.
• How environmental due diligence and human rights due diligence go hand in hand
• Linda’s message to businesses about implementing the CSDDD

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This week in Frankly Speaking, we put the spotlight on a new report produced by the OECD and analysing the state of corporate sustainability reporting in the world.

To discuss it, we welcome Caio de Oliveira, policy analyst at the OECD, who's had major responsibility in producing the report and who leads the sustainability work streams at the OECD on behalf of the Corporate Governance Committee and the Financial Markets Committee at the organisation. Caio has previously worked for the Brazilian government's Economic Ministry and for the country's Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM).

Richard and Caio address:

• The findings of the OECD’s Global Corporate Sustainability 2024 report

• How much and to what degree is sustainability reporting going on by companies

• The high levels of reporting of scope 1 and scope 2 GHG emissions compared to low levels of scope 3 indirect emissions reporting

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Many of us know that dependence of developing countries on raw commodities leaves them vulnerable to price volatility and sees profit made in countries where the commodity is imported and then processed, rather than where it is produced. It's often farmers in those developing countries who are at the end of the line. That problem has been specifically highlighted in the cocoa sector this year.

Today in the podcast we look at where cocoa prices have gone parabolic, rising from just over 2,000 USD a tonne in 2022 to over $10,000 a tonne in 2024. It’s seen not just companies and farmers in producer companies suffer, but major chocolate companies in the global North, which have seen costs multiply and their share prices plummet by up to a third.

To discuss what's happening here, our guest is Antonie Fountain, managing director of the Voice Network, watchdog and catalyst for a reformed cocoa sector. Antonie is also the co-author of the Cocoa Barometer, the biennial review of sustainability in Cocoa.

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