Armed with astounding numbers, what was once a fringe approach is now becoming a grant narrative in the world of investing.
Globally, more than $40.5tn is now estimated to be invested using “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) analyses.
Governments, corporations, and other groups raised a record $490bn last year selling green, social, and sustainability bonds. A further $347bn poured into ESG-focused investment funds: An all-time high.
And more than 700 new funds were launched globally in 2020 to capture the deluge of inflows, according to Bloomberg report.
Moody’s Investors Service expects sustainable-debt issuance to reach $650bn this year, while money flows to ESG funds show no signs of slowing.
This will be the year of “green stimulus as major economies attempt to integrate their economic recovery and job creation initiatives with their longer-term efforts to reduce carbon emissions,” Moody’s writes in a recent report.
Investor demand for ESG products is surging, too. Some 95% of millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996, approximately) were interested in sustainable investing as recently as 2019, up 9 percentage points from 2017, according to a Morgan Stanley report.
Such buying power should help explain why fund-management behemoths in the world, including BlackRock Inc, Vanguard Group, and State Street Global Advisors, are flooding the market with ESG-focused funds, according to analysts.
Organised efforts at responsible investing can be traced back decades. These approaches, which focused on screening out companies seen as doing specific kinds of harm, later came under the term “socially responsible investing”, or SRI. 
Over time, more companies adopted “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) policies amid increasing scrutiny of their business practices. 
Some investors also advocated what became known as impact investing as they sought to make a positive effect on the world, rather than just avoid the bad stuff.
The biggest change under ESG is that SRI, CSR and impact investing are now coming under a single umbrella just as ESG has been embraced by policymakers, regulators, and an ever-bigger number of investors.
ESG investing accounts for concerns from gender equality to worker rights to new ways to provide funding to charities working in poor countries. 
Matter-of-factly, there are also pressing concerns when it comes to ESG investing.
While many companies have so-called ESG programmes in place, some of them are failing to perform in line with their stated metrics, according to an industry poll conducted in December.
Too many of the so-called ESG funds are also investing in industries and companies that have done little to lessen their carbon footprint. 
Such trends underscore the need for setting up globally sustainable ESG principles.
Longer-term, it’s now abundantly clear which way the wind is blowing. 
BlackRock, has put its $8.7tn heft behind a powerful message to chief executives everywhere: The decades ahead will be defined by minimising emissions, requiring an overhaul to everyone’s business models.
“There is no company whose business model won’t be profoundly affected by the transition to a net-zero economy – one that emits no more carbon dioxide than it removes from the atmosphere by 2050,” CEO Larry Fink writes in his “Dear CEO” letter released at end-January.
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