ESG reporting standards were developed by and for finance and investment professionals without any input from Indigenous peoples and are failing to capture their rights and interests in companies’ ESG assessments, according to First Nations Major Projects Coalition, a collection of First Nations that want to have greater say over major development projects and their environmental impacts.
Last year the coalition released a report that found the four leading ESG standards — the GRI, Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, Task-force for Climate-related Financial Disclosures and Climate Disclosure Standards Board — fail to adequately reflect Indigenous perspectives.
That absence means reporting standards are missing an important risk factor that could delay or even sink mining or energy projects, lead to protracted litigation and repetitional risk, and eat into investors’ returns, said Mark Podlasly, the FNMPC’s…
