Speaker: Abigail Dean, Nuveen Real Estate
1. What projects does your committee work on?
Abigail Dean: This year, the ESG committee is working on a number of projects. We've been finalising the ESG standard data delivery sheet and promoting the new sustainability guidelines which were redone last year. We're also working on a new net zero carbon paper to help further the industry understanding of this topic. And we're working on a number of projects related to regulation. For example, we've recently developed a survey to better understand the industry interpretation of the sustainable investment definition within the SFDR. And we're working on a number of consultation responses related to the SFDR and the SDR.
2. What is coming up next year?
Abigail Dean: Next year, the committee wants to focus more on some of the social aspects of ESG and potentially look at a social framework. Biodiversity is also going to be a big area of focus particularly with the release of the TNFD. And I'm sure that we'll be doing much further work on net zero carbon and releasing further papers on that topic.
3. What involvement (time and effort) is required to be on your committee?
Abigail Dean: We have six committee meetings a year and these last an hour and a half each, there's about an hour's worth of preparation for these, of reviewing papers. Beyond that, the time and effort involved relates to the subgroups that committee members are part of. And typically a committee member would join one or maybe two subgroups. They meet for about an hour or so every couple of weeks, over a 2 to 3 month period. And there is a bit of work involved in between, particularly if they're working on preparing an output such as a paper. But that's really down to the individual committee member to decide which subgroups they want to join and how involved in those they want to be.
