by Marc S. Gerber, Scott C. Hopkins, Simon Toms, Helena J. Derbyshire, Louise Batty, Adam M. Howard, Greg P. Norman, Damian R. Babic, Zoe Q. Cooper Sutton, Kathryn Gamble, Sym Hunt, Caroline S. Kim, Abigail B. Reeves, Patrick Tsitsaros, and Eleanor F. Williams

In a tumultuous year, one of the key clear messages to emerge from 2020 was that environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns are here to stay. As mentioned in our 31 July 2020 article “ESG in 2020: A Half-Year Review,” although many investors feared that the focus on ESG policies would fall away in the face of an economic crisis, the opposite appears to have occurred. The pandemic instead has triggered a debate on what societies really value, and at the same time exposed the extent of global interconnectedness and the “tragedy of the horizon” whereby societies fail to plan in the longer term and only address issues when it is too late. This focus continued throughout 2020 and, as a result, many now regard the coming months and years as an opportunity to rebuild economies with ESG matters, corporate purpose and sustainability firmly placed at the fore. In this three-part post, we review the key trends that emerged in 2020 and continued to develop in the second half of the year. We then set out our expectations for the trends that will emerge or continue in the ESG sphere over the coming year.

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