> NASDAQ’s Evan Harvey:
Pushing Capital Towards Sustainability
E
van Harvey cares. About market performance, reputation, stakeholders, and the environment. The Global Head of Sustainability of the NASDAQ exchange is convinced that green will remain the colour of money. “Sustainability,” he says, “is simply a smarter strategy for corporates.” Harvey emphasises that sustainability principles dovetail seamlessly with the premises on which NASDAQ was founded in 1971: data efficiency, effective insight, market access, and smarter strategies. The NASDAQ ESG Reporting Guide – a holy book for those corporates that take their future seriously – spells out the vast range of internal and external benefits for companies that put their operations and processes on a sustainable footing. Investors and other stakeholders can use the guide to better assess the environmental, social, and governance performance of listed companies. Harvey notes that young entrepreneurs seem to embrace sustainable management principles and feel no hesitation to leverage those in order to attract the best talent and build their business. “These managers are also keenly aware that their businesses are under heightened public scrutiny. Boards are changing too, and expanding their risk management oversight to include sustainability,” he says. The NASDAQ sustainability lead is not one to wait for events to happen or frameworks to change. Harvey is used to driving developments, and has helped launch programmes that seek to improve the understanding of sustainability principles among listed companies. “We believe the exchange community has a practical and public role to play in the development of a more sustainable market ecosystem.” Harvey knows what he is talking about: he remembers watching news reports of the Cuyahoga Rover catching fire during his formative years. The industrial waterway, running for about 140 km from its source in Northeast Ohio to Lake Erie, has caught fire at least 13 times since 1868 due to a concentration of flammable pollutants. Harvey also recalls many other landmark environmental disasters such as Three Mile Island, Love Canal, and Bhopal. He is determined to help clean up the world: “As our collective awareness of an existential climate 74
Evan Harvey
threat grew, so did my ambition to dedicate myself to these issues. “I always believed in the capital markets system as a force for global change, for economic and social empowerment. So now I find myself very advantageously positioned to do some good.” Harvey, an optimist as much as a realist, is convinced that opportunities abound, and that any challenges along the way can be addressed. “Just imagine a global capital market where relevant sustainability performance factors are reported as promptly and accurately as financial factors,” he says. “Investors can use the data to better understand companies and create smarter, more long-term investment vehicles.” Harvey has a few suggestions for index compilers as well: “You can mix and match the data in millions of ways to tease out investible themes: supply chain oversight, data centre efficiency, renewable energy innovation.” Sustainability parameters may help with regulatory oversight and risk-forecasting, as well by leveraging more detailed and sophisticated behavioural models. “This would allow us to collectively and systematically push capital into more sustainable directions,” Harvey says. i
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