Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Sentiment Polls, Q1 2022 - Thematic Research

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Sentiment Polls, Q1 2022 - Thematic Research

Summary

The analysis is based on polls designed to help us understand the current sentiment of the business community towards ESG (environmental, social, and governance).

Key Highlights

• The number of respondents who believed that companies are fully committed to ESG remained at 19% in Q1 2022 compared to Q4 2021. Furthermore, in both Q1 2022 and Q4 2021, a quarter of respondents said they did not know if their company had an ESG plan. This suggests either a lack of transparency at a company level or a lack of planning.
• Over a quarter of respondents stated that businesses treat ESG initiatives as a mere marketing exercise. This perception of greenwashing coincides with the low number of those who consider businesses to be fully committed to ESG. These results are very similar to Q4 2021. Over the last quarter, there has been little to convince respondents that businesses are more committed to ESG than they were at the end of 2021.
• When asked which theme out of five options would most impact their business in the coming 12 months, ESG only received 16% of the vote. It was superseded by digital transformation and COVID-19, which continues to cause significant disruption. ESG as a theme is considered to be tomorrow’s problem. In the next 12 months, companies are likely to focus on mitigating the continuing impact of COVID-19 and implementing digital solutions.

• Our sentiment polls ran between January and April 2022 on GlobalData's Verdict network of B2B websites, which had 70 million unique visitors in the period from December 2020 to April 2022. In total, 1,115 respondents participated in the survey.
• The survey looked at attitudes towards ESG, the most important theme impacting businesses over the next decade.

• This survey gives a unique insight into the views of the business community on ESG. The responses provide insight into attitudes towards ESG, including whether companies have changed their behavior to meet ESG targets.