Sustainability in the asset world
Does the topic
sustainability concern the financial markets somehow at all? As far as
the ecological dimension is concerned, the financial markets as pure
service industry cause no large environmental damage in their activity.
However, the fact shouldn’t be forgotten that “each form of development,
eather sustainable or not, must be financed to a large extent by these
markets”.
Sustainability
in the asset world will then become a even more important topic, the
more strongly the aspects of sustainability effect on the economic
success of financial intermediate. These would then increasingly let the
three dimensions of the sustainability flow into their financial
products, which would lead again to the fact that the offerers of such
products could exert an increased influence on the enterprises whose
equity is contained in these products.
The concept of the
sustainability with its three dimensions is not sufficient in the asset
world in order to call an enterprise sustainable. In the asset world,
the dark times of the stock exchange particularly showed that all
visions, strategies and goals of an enterprise as well as its positive
operational results no longer are sufficient to win the confidence of
the investors. Today
the meaning of rumors has rosen. The fundamental confidence into the
published statements of the enterprises has clearly been weakened in
particular by the heavy consequence scandals of the years 2002 and 2003.
How can is the confidence of the investors into the enterprise be
repaired and/or basically made possible? The enterprise must openly
present their activities which means make them transparent for the
investor. Also the three sustainability dimensions can be reconstructed
only by means of a transparent enterprise communication. According to
that, one the diagram can be completed as follows:
The Four-Dimension Model
Graph
2:
Four-Dimension-Model of sustainability in the asset world
A Sustainability fund has to pay special attention to the adherence to
ecological, economic and social criteria and the communication politics
of the enterprises in the sense of transparency, by choosing the shares
that schould be included in the fund.
[Sustainability]
[Sustainability in the asset world] [Standard]
Stephan Schmidheiny: Finanzmärkte und Ökoeffizienz. In Rolf Gerling,
Stephan Schmidheiny: Sustainable development: Finanzmärkte im
Paradigmawechsel. München 1996, S. 11
vgl. Stephan Schmidheiny, Frank Figge: Finanzmärkte - Treiber oder
Bremser des betrieblichen Umweltmanagements. In: Eberhard Seidel:
Betriebliches Umweltmanagement im 21. Jahrhundert. Aspekte, Aufgaben,
Perspektiven. Berlin, Heidelberg 1999, S. 288
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