The First Sentier MUFG SustainabIe Investment Institute

Global food sector activities profoundly impact human health, with obesity, malnutrition, food insecurity and antimicrobial resistance from animal farming posing critical challenges.

Lithium-ion batteries are used in electric vehicles, energy storage, consumer electronics and medical devices; they play a key role in enabling the shift towards renewable energy by stabilising the fluctuations from the renewable sources such as wind and solar and enable their integration into the electrical grid. Global demand for batteries is expected to significantly increase with the rise in EV sales and expansion of energy storage. 

Global food systems are facing the challenge of meeting growing demand driven by population, economic, and urbanisation growth in a world where the threat posed by climate risks and extreme weather hazards is increasingly significant.

With this video, the First Sentier MUFG Sustainable Investment Institute launches its Food Systems series, focusing on environmental and social challenges linked to global food value chains and measures that investors and the wider stakeholder community can take to meet those challenges.

This report, produced by Pensions for Purpose, focuses on asset owners’ approaches to integrating nature and biodiversity into their sustainability priorities, governance frameworks, resource capacity, reporting, and asset manager expectations, as well as data-related challenges.

In this video, FSI MUFG Sustainable Investment Institute introduces the evolving concept of children’s rights and their relevance to business and investors.

Modern slavery impacts every country, region, company and supply chain in the world, with almost 50 million people estimated to be living in modern slavery globally. As business and investors may be exposed to modern slavery and forced labour through their operations or supply chains, they are increasingly expected to assess and address modern slavery risks and provide or enable remediation of modern slavery cases in their operations and investments. 

Discover the global concerns surrounding PFAS chemicals, their adverse health and environmental impacts, regulatory actions, growing litigation risks, and new opportunities for waste management and environmental testing services. Explore the comprehensive report for more insights.

This report builds on the themes of the ‘Why Nature’ video to explore what is presently being disclosed, measured and assessed by companies, highlighting good practices and identifying gaps and challenges in order to provide investors with useful information that can be used in company engagement. The report analyses disclosure of 16 companies, two from each of the TNFD priority sectors, selected based on high environmental performance and/or ratings according to existing benchmarks or providers and geographic location by head office.

Stakeholders including regulators, investors and companies have extended considerable efforts to advance gender diversity in the workplace. Other aspects of diversity (including equity and inclusion) and their business benefits are often less well understood.

We present key DEI considerations related to ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, disability and neurodivergence, and analyse intersections of these characteristics, equipping investors with knowledge necessary to assess potential risks in portfolio companies and drive best practices, through engagement. Newer DEI reporting frameworks, which may increase both data availability and materiality over time, are analysed. The study is accompanied by an overview of DEI practices in Japan and their demographic context.

The ecosystem services provided by nature have declined faster in the last fifty years, creating some serious and rapidly growing risks for companies and their investors due to our dependencies on nature. The recent release of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) framework) underscores the importance of this topic to the financial industry. 

The last two decades have been marked by an increasing emphasis on the role of investor engagement in influencing investee companies to deliver changed outcomes.  Based on the academic literature insights , company survey and interview results, this report offers recommendations shareholders could adopt to ensure that their engagements are more likely to drive meaningful change in companies’ behaviour, strategy and policy.

This Guidance Note aims to provide practical guidance on how investors and other businesses can apply the general expectations set out in the Due Diligence Guidelines, using modern slavery as a specific example. The information in this Guidance Note can also be used by investors and other businesses outside of Japan to inform their modern slavery and broader human rights risk management.

This reports clarifies the current state of play in efforts made to achieve the SDGs and the existing financing gap, and then reviews the role institutional investors can play in closing this gap.

The growing popularity of sustainable investments has spurred an increasing volume of of regulatory responses globally - from monitoring market developments to new regulations and guidelines.

The rapid evolution of sustainable investment has presented governance challenges for fund boards. Our report identifies those challenges and provides suggestions on how to strengthen expertise and governance.

In this report, we disuss sources, distribution and interventions of this invisible pollution which is rapidly becoming an environmental and health concern.