Sustainable Finance and Risk Management was hardly on the agenda 10 years ago. Nowadays, environmental and social risks are one of the leading risks that need to be managed when evaluating financial issues. Today, 4 of the top 5 risks that the business world can face are social or environmental. Financial and legislative risks in the world and Turkey are increasingly replaced by social, environmental and governance (ESG) risks leaving. It would be fair to say that institutions are still limited in recognizing, prioritizing, managing and explaining these new risks.
As BCSD Turkey, we are conducting Sustainable Financial Forum and Reporting Matters projects in order to keep an agenda on financial sustanability and to increase the resistance towards environmental and social risks in the business world.
Reporting Matters is a methodology developed through the cooperation between WBCSD, our parent organization, and Radley Yeldar, a London-based consultancy company. The methodology aims at improving the quality of non-financial reports. As BCSD Turkey, we have introduced Reporting Matters in Turkey. The process consists of 3 phases:
The main report containing the evaluations were shared with the public with a launching event. Reporting Matters 2017 and Reporting Matters 2018 reports can be downloaded from the publications section.
Sustainable Finance Forum has been organized each year since 2013 in cooperation with the United Nations Environment Program Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) and Global Compact Turkey. The purpose of the forum is to increase the awareness about sustainable finance in the banking sector, non-banking finance sector and real sector and to share the best practices. Each year, a theme is determined for the forum, and experts on the subject are invited as speakers and panellists both from Turkey and from the whole world.
The Forum also aims to keep sustainable finance on the agenda of the business world and to promote good practice. The purpose of Sustainable Finance Forum is to raise awareness of the increasing environmental, social and governance risks, and to link the risk, strategy and decision-making processes while improving corporate performance.