ESG COMMISSION TM

Since 1996, The Commission has worked to serve the World.

The ESG Commission is a global educational body dedicated to cultivating a world

of peace in which all people can live in harmony, sustainability, freedom, and

prosperity.

Our Commissioners and Good Will Ambassadors are world recognized experts and

influencers in the areas of finance, wealth management, law, science, diplomacy,

leadership, philosophy & spirituality. Join today to become part of our

international educational and conference network.

The Original Commission was founded in 1996 by the original founders of the

Graduate Leadership Society, the Institute for International Professional Analysts,

and Tax Law Review . The founders of our Commission are CEOs, Executives,

Professors, Leaders, and Industry experts from around the globe.

We meet twice per year to propose new government policies, ideas, and other

insights to nations, NGOs, agencies and leading global companies. We seek

harmony, freedom, peace and prosperity for all nations. While discussions during

our educational and speaker sessions are not reported publicly, the list of dignitaries

adivsors and commissioners attending is usually available. Distinguished members

attending are always careful to insist that they participate as individuals and not as

representatives of their government.

Our VIP executive education standards are based on to ISO standards and

accredited degree programs and assessments from the best business, law, & other

degree programs. Thus, our education, speaker, and certification standards are

unmatched, and we confer designations to qualified professionals, managers and

executives who have earned accredited degree education and passed accredited

program exams. The ESG Commission is a registered trademark in Colorado USA

CEOs, heads of state and other influential people of the world are routinely invited

to the yearly ESG Commission conference which is dedicated to the 4 Ps

Mission: The mission of the ESG Commission is to advocate for ESG Based Principles and Education. We are committed to transforming lives through perenial ethics, common sence values, and smart global policy. Our mission is to: Advocate and Increase Education, Foster Fellowship and Unity, Increase Knowledge of ESG Literature, & Boost Understanding of Rules , Teachings, Principles, and Life Skills. The ESG Commission is also dedicated to world peace, stakeholder prosperity, and protecting environmental justice and rural lands from pollution. The Commission sternly repudiates: hate, divisiveness, politics, unethical ideas, and racist messages within any sacred or board room setting. The time has come to put stakeholders, children, the elderly, the disabled , our most vulnerable, and working families first. Our leaders of the world ESG Commission support: 1) Use of ESG for Peace for all nations 2) Ethnic Harmony rather than Divisiveness 3) Prosperity and Essential Education for all Corporate Boards and Officers 4) Teaching Principles that are Sustainable and 4) (Power) The Ethical cultivation & use of Power while lifting up education and quality of living for all nations.

THE BOARD OF STANDARDS - COLORADO USA

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ESG COMMISSION

Made with ESG

ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. Investors are increasingly applying these non-financial factors as part of their analysis process to identify material risks and growth opportunities. Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance, also known as ESG, describes the three main areas of concern that have developed as the central factors in measuring the sustainability and ethical impact of an investment in a company or business. Within these three areas are a broad set of concerns that are increasingly being included in the non financial factors that figure in the valuation of equity, real- estate, corporations and all fixed-income investments. ESG is the catch-all term for the criteria used in what has become known as Socially Responsible Investment. History Throughout history, the holders of financial assets have made decisions as to where those assets will be placed. The decisions were based on various criteria, financial return being the predominant one.[1] However there have always been plenty of other criteria for deciding where to place your money – from Political considerations to Heavenly Reward. There were also those whose decisions were based on ethical criteria, the Free Traders, the Quakers and the early Abolitionists amongst them. A long, though not widely adopted, tradition of socially responsible work practices existed in Britain dating back to the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th century, such figures as Robert Owen in his New Lanark Mills,[2] John Cadbury’s Quaker run factories in Birmingham, William Lever's Port Sunlight village [3] had all contributed to the promotion of workers’ welfare and rights, not to mention providing ample evidence that socially responsible work practices need not be financially damaging. Titus Salt in the middle of the 19th century had even recognised the damage that his mills’ smoke and pollution were emitting and had attempted to clean up the town of Bradford, England using his family business’ dominance of manufacturing in that area.[4] But it was in the 1950s and 60s that the vast pension funds managed by the Trades Unions recognised the opportunity to affect the wider social environment using their capital assets [5] - in the United States the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers invested their not inconsiderable capital in developing affordable housing projects, whilst the United Mine Workers invested in health facilities.[6] In the 1970s the worldwide abhorrence of the apartheid regime in South Africa led to one of the most renowned examples of selective disinvestment along ethical lines. As a response to a growing call for sanctions against the regime, the Reverend Leon Sullivan, a Board Member of General Motors in the United States drew up a Code of Conduct in 1971 for practising business with South Africa. What became known as the Sullivan Principles attracted a great deal of attention and several reports were commissioned by the Government, to examine how many US companies were investing in South African companies that were contravening the Sullivan Code. The conclusions of the reports led to a mass disinvestment by the US from many South African companies. The resulting pressure applied to the South African regime by its business community added great weight to the growing impetus for the system of apartheid to be abandoned.[7] In the 1960s and 70s Milton Friedman, in direct response to the prevailing mood of philanthropy argued that social responsibility adversely affects a firm’s financial performance and that regulation and interference from Big Government will always damage the macro economy.[8] His contention that the valuation of a company or asset should be predicated almost exclusively on the pure bottom line (with the costs incurred by social responsibility being deemed non- essential), underwrote the belief prevalent for most of the 20th century. Towards the end of the century however a contrary theory began to gain ground. In 1988 James S. Coleman wrote an article in the American Journal of Sociology entitled Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital, the article challenged the dominance of the concept of ‘self-interest’ in economics and introduced the concept of Social Capital into the measurement of value.[9] On March 24, 1989 the oil tanker the Exxon- Valdez struck a reef in the Prince William Sound, Alaska and the resulting oil spill covered 1,300 miles (2,100 km) of pristine coastline with 10.8 million US gallons (41,000 m3) of crude oil.[10] The environmental cost of the disaster combined with the financial cost of the clean up (and the threat of financial penalty to Exxon) caused the industrial world to re-think their definitions of risk. In direct response to the Exxon-Valdez disaster, a group of high value North American investors combined to form the pressure group Ceres in November 1989. It applied a new form of pressure however, acting in a coalition with environmental groups, it used the leveraging power of its collective investors to encourage companies and capital markets to incorporate environmental and social challenges into their day-to-day decision-making. The Ceres coalition today represents one of the world’s strongest investment groups with over 60 institutional investors from the U.S. and Europe managing over $4 trillion in assets.[11] Although the concept of selective investment was not a new one with the demand side of the investment market having a long history of those wishing to control the effects of their investments, what began to develop at the turn of the 21st century was a response from the supply-side of the equation. The investment market began to pick up on the growing need for products geared towards what was becoming known as the Responsible Investor. In 1998 John Elkington, co-founder of the business consultancy SustainAbility, published Cannibals with Forks: the Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business in which he identified the newly emerging cluster of non financial considerations which should be included in the factors determining a company or equity’s value. He coined the phrase the Triple Bottom Line, referring to the financial, environmental and social factors included in the new calculation. At the same time the strict division between the environmental sector and the financial sector began to break down. In the City of London in 2002, Chris Yates-Smith a member of the international panel chosen to oversee the technical construction, accreditation and distribution of the Organic Production Standard and founder of one if the City of London’s leading Branding Consultancies, established one of the first environmental finance research groups. The informal group of financial Big-wigs, City Lawyers and Environmental Stewardship NGOs became known as The Virtuous Circle, its brief was to examine the nature of the correlation between environmental and social standards and financial performance. Several of the world’s big banks and investment houses began to respond to the growing interest in the ESG Investment Market with the provision of sell-side services, among the first were the Brazilian bank Unibanco, and Mike Tyrell’s Jupiter Fund in London which used ESG based research to provide both HSBC and Citicorp with selective investment services in 2001. In the early years of the new millennium, the major part of the investment market still accepted the historical assumption that ethically directed investments were by their nature likely to reduce financial return. Philanthropy was not known to be a highly profitable business and Friedman had provided a widely accepted academic basis for the argument that the costs of behaving in an ethically responsible manner would outweigh the benefits. However the assumptions were beginning to be fundamentally challenged. In 1998 two journalists Robert Levering and Milton Moskowitz had brought out the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, initially a listing in the magazine Fortune, then a book compiling a list of the best practicing companies in the United States with regard to Corporate Social Responsibility and how their financial performance fared as a result. Of the three areas of concern that ESG represented, the environmental and social had received most of the public and media attention, not least because of the growing fears concerning climate change. Moskowitz brought the spotlight onto the Corporate Governance aspect of Responsible Investment. His analysis concerned how the companies were managed, what the stockholder relationships were and how the employees were treated. He argued that improving Corporate Governance procedures did not damage financial performance, on the contrary it maximised productivity, ensured corporate efficiency and led to the sourcing and utilising of superior management talents. In the early noughties, the success of Moskowitz’s list and its impact on company’s ease of recruitment and Brand reputation began to challenge the historical assumptions regarding the financial effect of ESG factors.[12] In 2005 however a quantum leap was taken in the integration of ESG considerations into the mainstream investment market. The United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative commissioned a report from the international law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer on the interpretation of the law with respect to investors and ESG issues. The conclusions of the report were startling. Freshfields concluded that not only was it permissible for investment companies to integrate ESG issues into investment analysis but it was arguably part of their fiduciary duty to do so.[13][14] Where Friedman had provided the academic support for the argument that the integration of ESG type factors into financial practice would reduce financial performance, numerous reports began to appear in the early years of the century which provided research that supported arguments to the contrary.[15] In 2006 Oxford University’s Michael Barnett and New York University’s Robert Salomon published a highly influential study which concluded that the two sides of the argument might even be complementary – they propounded a curvilinear relationship between social responsibility and financial performance, both selective investment practices and non-selective could maximise financial performance of an investment portfolio, the only route likely to damage performance was a half-hearted middle way of some degree of selective investment.[16] ESG began to cease being the exclusive domain of the patronised Do- Gooders. Besides the large investment companies and banks taking an interest in matters ESG, an array of investment companies specifically dealing with Responsible Investment and ESG based portfolios began to spring up throughout the financial world. The development of ESG factors as considerations in investment analysis is now widely assumed by the investment industry to be all but inevitable.[17] The evidence supporting a nexus between performance on ESG issues and financial performance is becoming greater and the combination of fiduciary duty and a wide recognition of the necessity of the sustainability of investments in the long term has meant that Environmental Social and Corporate Governance concerns are now becoming increasingly prominent in the Investment Market’s mind.[18] ESG has become less a question of philanthropy than practicality. There has been wide uncertainty and debate as to what to call the inclusion of intangible factors relating to the sustainability and ethical impact of investments. Names have ranged from the early use of buzz words such as Green and Eco, to the wide array of possible descriptions for the types of investment analysis - Responsible Investment, Socially Responsible Investment, ethical, extra- financial, Long Horizon Investment (LHI), enhanced business, corporate health, non- traditional - the list is long. But the predominance of the term ESG has now become fairly widely accepted. A survey of 350 global investment professionals conducted by AXA Investment Managers and AQ Research in 2008, led by Dr Raj Thamotheram, Director of Responsible Investment at AXA, concluded that although both ESG and ‘Sustainable’ were the most commonly used names for the new data integrated into mainstream investment analysis, the vast majority of professionals preferred the term ESG to describe such data. Over the last couple of years, a series of ESG research, analysis and ratings providers have emerged in this field.