Marcia Ellis was quoted in AsianInvestor as part of its coverage of Morrison Foerster’s recently published inaugural Asia Funds ESG Report. Drawing on the results of the survey, the article describes how Asia GPs should focus on ESG data and performance to improve their ESG credentials and catch up with their peers in Europe and the U.S.
Marcia comments, “It’s not at all standard yet. It feels to me like back 15 years ago when we had to explain to people why they should have anti-corruption provisions in their documents, and now it’s bog standard. But I think limited partners (LPs) will start pushing on this and it’ll become more common”.
On the difficulty of collating data on climate change, Marcia notes, “There’s no agreement on standards in this area”.
“What we’re finding is that it’s not even just that there’s a problem with differences of standards – most of these funds aren’t even requiring their portfolio companies to provide them with that – so we’re not even at the stage of saying the data isn’t good. We don’t have the data”.
She also comments, “There’s going to be a lot of pressure on portfolio companies and on funds from contracting partners, from different LPs from Europe and from North America, all of whom are going to be looking for different things”.
“All of them are going to have different standards and it’s going to be really difficult, especially for heads of sustainability and heads of ESG, to figure out what they should do ‒ and that’s just talking about climate-related ESG”.
Read the full article.