When you read the notes to companies’ Annual Reports you will come across the concept of financial materiality. Should a company uncovers an error that caused it to misstate revenues, expenses, or valuations, if the amount of money involved does not exceed a certain threshold, it is not required to restate its financial results. Why?
Read more
The next time you toss out an overripe banana or search for the “Use By” date on a can that has been in the cupboard for, umm…, a while, think about this: Estimates show that up to one-third of all food produced worldwide is never consumed, and 1.4 billion hectares of land, which represents 28
Read more
Carl Sagan once wrote, “For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” In other words, he dealt in facts. For those who are not old enough to remember Carl Sagan, he was an astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, and
Read more
Carbon emissions receive a great deal of attention in conversations about ESG and sustainable investing, and rightfully so. Climate change—caused by CO2 (and methane) emissions that are generated directly or indirectly by human activity—is now having economic and humanitarian consequences that range from dire to catastrophic. But this focus on CO2 emissions can unintentionally downplay
Read more
Regulators and supranational standard-setters around globally are establishing requirements on the ESG data that companies must gather and how that information is to be reported. This is not a “woke” exercise—many accounting professionals believe that even traditional financial reports should include data related to ESG risks because they can impact the value of a company’s
Read more
Consider the following scenario: two people are striving to win the title of “Best in Category X”. One of them (we’ll call her Joanna, for no reason at all), comes from an upper-middle class family, went to good schools, received training from experts, and never had to worry about things like food, shelter, or being
Read more
England is roasting as London records its hottest day ever—not many homes there have air conditioning because until now, they rarely needed it. Spain is literally on fire. Triple-digit high temperatures are forecast across much of the U.S. (again), and power grids are under stress as a dangerous heatwave affects over 100 million people. This
Read more
Nature’s balance reflects interdependence We all learned in school that animals breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide – toxic for us – while plants and trees breathe in CO2 and give off the oxygen animals (including us humans) need to survive. What an amazing balance of supply and demand to meet the survival needs
Read more
Arlington, TX – June 15, 2022 – First Rate Ventures, a premier Dallas/Fort Worth-based FinTech-focused venture capital fund, today announced its first investment in OWL ESG from its recently launched $25 million venture capital fund. First Rate Ventures led the Series A investment round. Led by ESG expert and entrepreneur Ben Webster, OWL ESG leverages machine learning and natural
Read more
For those who prefer “give it to me straight” over “beat around the bush”, we offer this opener from a recent article about misconceptions about ESG investing, published by GreenBiz: “The market demands ESG discipline, period. Whether you view ESG as the alpha and the omega, an opportunity for capitalism to atone and course correct,
Read more
ESG investing has spread across institutional asset management, expanding beyond equities to include green corporate and municipal bonds and even private markets. At a minimum, asset managers are expected to measure the E, S and G risk characteristics of their strategies and around the world the bar is being raised in terms of regulatory disclosure
Read more
Nature’s most obvious form of carbon capture – forests – are imperfect in terms of their ability to address the need. They have a limited capacity and take many years to grow. They also carry the inherent risk that fire will release the trapped carbon, destroying the carbon offset potential those trees represented. While we
Read more
We work with all types of investment firms, corporations and fintech platforms around the world. Find out how OWL can meet your need for ESG data and analytics today.
