Sustainability, Technology, and Finance

This book explores the swiftly emerging nexus between sustainability, finance, and technology.

Leading practitioners and academic thought leaders reflect on the ways in which technology and digitalization shape how sustainable finance professionals address environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. Together, the contributors identify three spheres in which technology shapes how investors make sense of such issues:

• ESG and technology: finance professionals need to know about how technological innovations, such as chemical recycling for plastics, in the real economy shape firms’ ESG performance;
• ESG through technology: technological developments, such as AI and blockchain, can enable finance professionals to offer more fine-grained ESG analyses; and
• ESG as technology: the ESG agenda itself is influenced by technological developments that are not well understood by practitioners (e.g., data mining for Bitcoin creating significant emissions).

Using practically relevant examples and recent insights from people working in the field, the book explores the linkages between sustainability, technology, and finance in different contexts and shows how practitioners can accelerate needed change processes.

This book primarily addresses practitioners in companies and investment firms as well as students enrolled in executive education and MBA programs.

Herman Bril is Managing Director & Head of Responsible Investment at PSP Investments. He has 30 years of experience in international financial institutions across investment management, derivatives trading, treasury, and development finance.

Georg Kell is Chairman of Arabesque, a technology company that uses AI and big data to assess sustainability performance, and Chairman of the Volkswagen Sustainability Council. Georg founded the UN Global Compact, the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative. He also oversaw the launch of the PRI, PRME, and SSE.

Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business in Society at the Centre for Sustainability at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) and Associate Dean for the CBS Full-Time MBA program. He has authored more than 60 academic articles in top international journals and published various cases on topics related to ESG and corporate sustainability.