Greater numbers of listing venues around the world offer guidance on sustainability reporting
Stock exchanges have been catching up with growing investor demands, and a total of 63 venues are now offering written guidance to their listed companies on how to best disclose environmental, social and governance data, according to the UN-backed Sustainable Stock Exchanges initiative. The group accounts for more than 44,000 listed companies and nearly $82tn in domestic market capitalisation, including the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, which introduced guidelines in 2021 and 2019, respectively, as well as the London Stock Exchange and Euronext operations. Interestingly, the first bourse to introduce written guidance was Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2006, says the SSE.
Numbers have been growing exponentially: 20 bourses offered ESG guidance five years ago and it was just 2 in 2011. However, today’s total is only about half of the exchanges monitored by the SSE, as HSBC points out in a research note, suggesting that others may soon follow thanks to greater regulatory attention to this space across the world.
A smaller group of 27 comprising Euronext venues and stock exchanges in Luxembourg, Vienna and 19 emerging markets has already gone a step further and requests ESG disclosures as a listing criteria.