Morgan Stanley Perspectives on Sustainable Investing: Acceleration and Integration

Abstract

The CEO of Morgan Stanley's Institute for Sustainable Investing discusses recent developments in the field since the founding of the Institute three years ago. The position of the Institute, which works across Morgan Stanley businesses as well as with external partners, provides a unique vantage point for assessing both the company's and the financial industry's progress in advancing the goals of sustainability.Since its inception, the Institute has focused on measuring investor interest and highlighting the performance realities of sustainable investing strategies, with the ultimate goal of helping to increase the adoption of such strategies by not only Morgan Stanley's clients, but throughout the industry. Drawing on its own survey data and on the research and views of the Institute's internal and external collaborators, the author describes not only the acceleration of investor interest and the emergence of new players, but also the progressive integration of sustainability with more traditional methods as ESG issues move from being peripheral to “material” and “strategic” considerations. Such integration is helping to ensure that sustainability concerns—and corporate efforts to deal with them—will prove more than just a temporary trend and assume a prominent, and permanent, position in the dialogue between companies and investors.