JPMorgan, Natixis-led Coalition Launches Guidelines to Help Companies Report on Progress Towards SDGs

The Impact Disclosure Taskforce, a group consisting of some of the world’s largest finance and investment companies, announced today the release of its final voluntary Impact Disclosure Guidance, aimed at helping businesses and governments to measure and report their efforts and progress to advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in order to facilitate the capital flows needed to meet global sustainability ambitions.

The UN SDGs refer to the 17 categories of goals adopted in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with the aim to protect the planet and improve the quality of life globally.  SDG targets include ending poverty and hunger, improving education, and protecting the environment.

Formed in 2023, the taskforce, co-chaired by representatives from JPMorgan and Natixis, and including a network of more than 80 financial institutions and industry stakeholders, was convened to address the lack of disclosure necessary to access the massive pools of sustainable capital required to achieve the SDGs – with investment needs estimated at $4 trillion annually – by corporate entities and sovereigns in jurisdictions with the most significant development gaps, which would also help investors and financiers direct capital to sustainable investments.

Gergana Thiel, Global Co-Head of Macro Sales, J.P. Morgan, said:

“Institutional investors that prioritize impact in their investment strategies are more varied and nuanced than traditional ESG investors. While some investors may seek impact on financial inclusion, others on water and sanitation, and others on gender equality; they all require better impact disclosure from entities issuing securities. This guidance will increase the investment opportunities across all themes, providing investors more choice to invest in accordance with their financial and non-financial criteria.”

The new guidance outlines a five-step process that can be followed by corporate and sovereign entities in order to measure and disclose the development impact of business strategies and national development plans.

Key aspects of the guidance highlighted by the taskforce include its entity-level, but context-specific nature, assessing the entity’s overall strategy in countries of focus, and measuring how the entity’s products, services, and operations are anticipated to address the most acute development gaps in each country; impact-oriented focus, highlighting outputs and outcomes, including plans to achieve outputs and the theory of change assumed to lead to outcomes, and; forward-looking orientation, establishing targets that measure intended impacts, as well as a commitment to monitoring and reporting progress against targets.

The taskforce said that it encourages banks and underwriters to highlight and promote the adoption of the guidance to their corporate and sovereign clients, institutional investors to review entities adopting the guidance for allocation from their sustainable or impact portfolios, data and analytics providers to support investors with independent verification and analysis of the development impact disclosures, and regulators to consider interoperability of the guidance with sustainable finance rules and disclosure regulations.

Going forward, the taskforce said that it will remain a resource to stakeholders looking to implement the new guidelines, and that it will now work on building market infrastructure to help disseminate and analyze disclosed impact information.

Natixis Corporate & Investment Banking’s Green and Sustainable Hub’s Cédric Merle Hamon and Leisa Cardoso De Souza said:

“The guidance is a new toolbox for framing a contribution to the UN SDGs in a readable way for financiers. It provides a step-by-step method and will nudge corporates and sovereign entities to set forward looking targets. It also paves the way for fruitful engagement on impact delivery and optimization, but also remediation as it includes negative effects.”

Click here to access the new Impact Disclosure Guidance.