The Taiwan Monthly

Dec. 2019

ESG

Enthusiastic sign-up for “Training Course on Dow Jones Sustainability Index Questionnaire” organized by TWSE

Taiwan Stock Exchange Corporation (TWSE) organized the “Training Course on Dow Jones Sustainability Index Questionnaire” in Taipei on November 26, which invited listed companies’ staff dedicated to corporate sustainability and social responsibility. The Training Course aims to share the information about international sustainable investing trends, contents of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index questionnaire and related risk management practices of environmental, social and corporate governance, showing listed companies’ emphasis on corporate sustainability.

 

The Dow Jones Sustainability Index is identified as the first corporate sustainability assessment indicator, where Dow Jones and RobecoSAM, a Switzerland-based asset management company, work with each other to apply the concept about corporate social responsibility to the preparation of index. The index follows up the performance of the companies which satisfy economic, environmental and social responsibility standards. More than thousands of enterprises will be invited to attend the assessment each year. The index is considered as one of the most important benchmarks applicable to the corporate social responsibility in the world. The Training Course specially invited Managing Director Edoardo Gai of RebecoSAM in Zurich, Switzerland to serve as the trainer of the Course.

 

As indicated by TWSE, according to the 2018 survey report by the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance (GSIA), the global sustainable investing scale has amounted to US$30.7 trillion, and the scale of assets managed by the investing institutions executing the UN Principles for Responsible Investment (“PRI”) has also amounted to more than US$8 0trillion. Apparently, the sustainable investing scale and demand are considered tremendous. In 2019, a total of 23 Taiwan-based enterprises were nominated by the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. Among the other things, 22 out of these enterprises were nominated by the Emerging Market Index, making Taiwan in the first place in the emerging market in terms of the number of companies and weights. 15 out of these enterprises were nominated by the World Index, making Taiwan in the seventh place in the world.

 

Nowadays, sustainability has already constituted an indispensable part of the enterprises’ development, and also represented a world trend. The sustainable management and co-existence with the environment are the important responsibilities to be fulfilled by enterprises, and can signify the value about “Taken from Society Give Back to Society". TWSE expects to call on more enterprises to participate in the international index assessment by organizing related training courses in the future in order to show the world the efforts made by Taiwan-based enterprises in the sustainability.

 

For further inquiries, please contact Mr. Kao at 1219@twse.com.tw .