Franklin Templeton has joined the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board’s investor advisory group, as part of its plans to improving investor disclosures.
The move sees the fund group join 44 other asset managers, with more than $33 trillion in assets under management. News of the company’s membership was announced at a meeting of the advisory group in London this week.
“The interest of the world’s leading institutional investors in SASB’s standards shows that better understanding of sustainability-related risk and opportunity is a crucial concern across global capital markets,” said Madelyn Antoncic, chief executive officer of SASB.
SASB established the separate advisory group in late 2016 to provide investor guidance for the organisation, and to demonstrate investor support for a market standard for investor-focused sustainability disclosure.
Julie Moret, head of ESG at Franklin Templeton, said the asset management group was impressed by the work that the SASB has done to date.
She said: “Franklin Templeton is a strong supporter of SASB’s work in establishing a market-based set of sustainability accounting standards that have been created collaboratively with industry and investors, representing industry specificity and comparability across industries.”
In November 2018, SASB published 77 industry-specific sustainability accounting standards which it says enable businesses to identify and communicate performance, on an industry-specific basis, on the sustainability issues that matter most to financial performance.
