What Investors Want from Sustainability Data

The report examines the challenges facing sustainable investing due to substandard ESG data, highlighting issues such as lack of standardization, poor coverage, and a specific inability to quantify physical climate risks. Based on interviews with investment practitioners managing $5.2 trillion in assets, it argues that while disclosure frameworks like TCFD and SASB are improving the landscape, investors still lack the granular asset-level data and standardized methodologies required to translate sustainability metrics into financial materiality. The document proposes several solutions, including the development of a Physical Resilience Protocol and the use of geospatial data to fill context gaps in corporate reporting.

• Investors face significant barriers to scaling sustainable investing due to four primary data limitations: incomplete coverage (particularly for fixed income, small cap, and emerging market companies), inconsistent reporting metrics due to the voluntary nature of disclosures, poor quality of data that relies on boilerplate language rather than quantitative indicators, and a lack of transparency in the proprietary methodologies used by rating agencies.
• There is a critical gap in the ability of investors to manage physical climate risks, such as sea level rise and extreme weather, because they lack standard measurement methods and the asset-level data necessary to convert these risks into financial terms.
• While climate-related scenario analysis is a key TCFD recommendation, it is currently hindered by a lack of standard methods and consistent assumptions, leading to results that are not comparable across companies and leaving investors skeptical or confused about their utility.
• Climate change creates material social risks that are often overlooked in ESG data, including increased interpersonal violence and conflict, declines in food security and nutritional value, health risks, labor productivity decreases, and the intensification of existing inequalities.
• To improve sustainability accounting, the document recommends several advances: the creation of underlying methodologies for measuring physical risks (similar to the GHG Protocol), new research to link climate stressors to business revenue and profit, better guidance for scenario analysis, and the integration of geospatial data with asset-level data to provide environmental context.

APA

World Resources Institute (2019). What Investors Want from Sustainability Data. https://www.wri.org/insights/what-investors-want-sustainability-data

Chicago

World Resources Institute. What Investors Want from Sustainability Data. 2019. https://www.wri.org/insights/what-investors-want-sustainability-data.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Resources Institute |title=What Investors Want from Sustainability Data |date=12 February 2019 |url=https://www.wri.org/insights/what-investors-want-sustainability-data |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldresourcesinstitute2019what, author = {{World Resources Institute}}, title = {{What Investors Want from Sustainability Data}}, institution = {World Resources Institute}, year = {2019}, month = feb, url = {https://www.wri.org/insights/what-investors-want-sustainability-data}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }