On Tuesday 14 October 2014, the 4th biennial Sustainable Stock Exchanges Global Dialogue took place at the United Nations Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. The initiative’s flagship event, the Global Dialogue brought together CEO’s of stock exchanges, companies, and institutional investors, alongside high-level policymakers and capital market regulators. This unique gathering offered a global platform to demonstrate leadership and understanding of the sustainability-related opportunities and challenges facing the capital markets today.
The SSE 2014 Global Dialogue was a 3.5-hour talk-show-style, high-level roundtable designed to stimulate unscripted discussion among the speakers without presentations or speeches. The moderator, a well-known business reporter of BBC News, Ms. Tanya Beckett, facilitated a fast-paced and interactive dialogue to a televised audience in Room XVIII of the Palais des Nations.
Held every two years, the SSE Global Dialogue is designed to bring together the key players in the field to analyze, promote and foster communication on stock exchanges’ sustainability-related activities. Stock exchanges will demonstrate progress while highlighting challenges and opportunities that can benefit from policy innovation. Market participants share experiences that can assist exchanges and their regulators in their efforts to better incorporate sustainable development into capital markets.
Questions that were addressed at the 2014 Global Dialogue included:
- What role can stock exchanges, regulators and investors play to improve the environmental social and governance (ESG) performance of companies? What are the experiences of listed companies in this area?
- What are the main challenges taking this agenda forward? Following on developments since the 2012 Sustainable Stock Exchanges Dialogue at the Earth Summit in Rio, how can capital market leaders build on the growing momentum? How can exchanges and other capital market participants contribute to the financing of the Sustainable Development Goals?
- What next steps can be taken by policymakers, regulators, investors, companies, and exchanges collectively? What are the key roles for each actor? What policy options are available to reinforce existing voluntary best practices?
The SSE Global Dialogue led to new and renewed commitments from the Partner Exchanges to take additional steps to promote ESG performance among their listed companies. The event also led to discussions with policymakers on how the rules of capital markets should be strengthened to better align market signals with internationally agreed sustainable development goals.
With Ministerial and senior regulator participation plus a range of CEOs from exchanges and institutional investors, past SSE Global Dialogues took place at the Global Compact 2012 Rio+20 Corporate Sustainability Forum in Brazil, the UNCTAD 2010 World Investment Forum in China, and the 2009 SSE Launch by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York.
In 2014, with the Sustainable Development Goals and the Post-2015 Agenda taking shape, the SSE Global Dialogue will be the forum for capital market leaders to take a leading role in creating a more sustainable and inclusive economy.
NOTE: This event already took place. The news release on this event can be found here.
FT coverage of 2014 Global Dialogue
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