On the ground in NYC: How climate change is forcing a new type of financial literacy

Corporates, financial institutions, investors and academics gathered in New York City on May 17 for the S&P Global Sustainable1 Summit to discuss topics such as net zero, the energy transition and ESG data challenges.

In this episode of the ESG Insider podcast, we bring you highlights from the panel discussions as well as interviews on the sidelines of the event.

We hear from Emily Chew, Chief Responsible Investment Officer at Calvert Research and Management, one of the largest responsible investment companies in the U.S. Emily talks about the intense level of engagement and coordination that climate change requires of companies.

"Every organization needs this multi-stakeholder, multi-pronged approach," she says. "It really stretches us into this new ... type of financial literacy that pertains to climate."

We also hear from the largest bank in the U.S. Rama Variankaval, Global Head of the Center for Carbon Transition at JPMorgan Chase and Co., talks about the challenge of putting climate targets into practice.

"We published a target and that's when the real work started," Rama says. "It's easy enough to put a glossy 20 pages with numbers on it and pretty pictures of trees, etc. But then you have to go and say: Ok, what do you do with this?"

We also sit down on the sidelines of the event with Josh Green, Co-Founder and COO of technology platform Novata, to talk about the role of private equity markets in ESG. "If all the public companies in the world are fantastic in reducing their carbon emissions but private companies keep doing business as usual, we are not going to solve our climate problem," he says.

And we talk with Simran Heer, Program Manager at Microsoft, who explains how the company uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to tackle sustainability issues.

We'd love to hear from you. To give us feedback on this episode or share ideas for future episodes, please contact hosts Lindsey Hall (lindsey.hall@spglobal.com) and Esther Whieldon (esther.whieldon@spglobal.com).

Register for the S&P Global Sustainable1 Summit here: https://www.spglobal.com/esg/sp-global-sustainable1-summit?utm_medium=social&utm_source=podcast&utm_content=ESGInsiderAd

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