Ep30 Past the ESG acronym – research and key green finance and investors’ issues, ft Charles Yonts

Hundreds of billions of dollars in global assets follow ESG principles. The massive growth seen in the past few years is set to continue, estimate various investments banks. This means that ESG research has become one of the pillars of green finance, socially responsible investing, impact investing and the like and is becoming part and parcel of standard investment research. In this episode, one of the region’s most respected ESG analysts, Charles Yonts who heads Asian ESG Research at Macquarie Group, first discusses the basics of the research that he does including the approach and the challenges. We then take a deeper dive into some of the interesting issues including battery supply chains – especially cobalt and nickel, greenwashing, coal divestment and other hot topics.

ABOUT CHARLES. Charles Yonts has been working as the Head of Asian ESG Research at Macquarie since 2020. He has spearheaded ESG integration efforts for the team, rolling out proprietary corporate governance and sustainability scores alongside stock analysts around the region. Before joining Macquarie, Charles led the ESG and Power Research teams at CLSA, where he worked for fifteen years. He also directly covered Greater China climate tech stocks from 2004 and was the top-rated earnings estimator for Asian Utilities in both 2018 and 2019 according to StarMine. Charles has a BS in Finance from the University of Minnesota and studied Chinese language and economics at Fudan University in Shanghai.

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