August 25, 2020 — In the past 60 years, women have amassed great financial power and now control 32% of the world’s wealth. The pandemic has threatened this progress; many women have been forced to choose between their careers and their families. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing can be a way to advance gender equality but company policies and reporting must first evolve to improve transparency around these issues.

August 17, 2020 — Eversource is a multi-utility company with four million electricity, natural gas, and water customers throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. Eversource has set an aggressive target to be carbon neutral by 2030, which the company plans to achieve by expanding its renewable energy portfolio while minimizing the use of conventional energy sources.

July 29, 2020 — Incorporated in 1987 and headquartered in Houston, Texas, Waste Management, Inc. is the largest provider of waste services in North America. The company provides waste sanitation services to nearly 20 million residential, commercial, and municipal customers in in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Canada. Waste Management, through its subsidiaries, generates revenue through a network of collection operations, transfer stations, landfills, recycling facilities, and waste-based energy production projects.

July 20, 2020 — It’s been an interesting laboratory environment for an investment strategy, and thus far Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing has shown robustness across all market environments. This digest showcases some of Sage’s ESG insights for the first half of 2020.

June 23, 2020 — Healthpeak Properties, Inc. is a Fortune 500 real estate investment trust (REIT) that owns a geographically diverse portfolio of over 700 properties spread across the health care industry, including senior housing, life science, and medical offices. From an ESG perspective, REITs generally operate in a low-risk industry, allowing Healthpeak and some of its peers to shine as ESG leaders.

June 15, 2020 — As ESG strategies continue to prove their mettle in the current challenging market environment, investors are turning to bonds that exhibit sustainable solutions and address global problems. As a group, these are referred to as impact bonds, and include green bonds, social bonds, and sustainability bonds. We see impact bonds as one way of adding sustainable value to client accounts.

June 1, 2020 — Since its beginnings as a Seattle coffee shop in 1971, Starbucks has changed the way people drink coffee and, becoming part of the daily routine of millions of people globally (in over 78 countries). With a brand value estimated to be worth about $40 billion (almost half of its market value), Starbucks is one of the largest and most well-recognized companies in the world.

May 26, 2020 — At Sage, we strive to fully integrate current and emerging ESG issues into the traditional sovereign credit analysis, and therefore we are excited to introduce our ESG Sovereign Credit Analysis and Scoring Framework.

May 15, 2020 — ESG began as a niche type of investing and has since captivated investors across the globe. Incorporating environmental, social, and governance factors has certainly been touted as a way to potentially mitigate previously overlooked financial risks while aligning with investors’ personal values. One of the biggest challenges for ESG investing has been, and still is, the question of returns. Did ESG investing really deliver the same, if not better, returns as traditional investing? Did ESG investing really cover losses on the downside? These questions were answered with a resounding “yes” in the first quarter of 2020.