Investors Pushing Environmental And Social Proposals

An increasing number of institutional investors have begun to include environmental and social (E&S) considerations within their established risk-return analysis framework, and investors will likely articulate their concerns much more often by voting against specific directors, committee members or entire boards. Immediate concerns about the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic may mean that some investors will be more lenient regarding E&S concerns for the short term, but “to the extent this leniency occurs in 2020, companies would be well advised to understand that any reprieve is temporary and unlikely to carry into 2021,” writes Hannah Orowitz, a managing director of Georgeson’s corporate advisory team, If your company has not yet assembled an environmental, social and governance (ESG) task force, she says, this may be a good time to consider it.