Sustainable Finance & Socially Responsible Investment

We’re celebrating Women’s History Month this March by introducing you to 10 women who help power your life at Duke Energy and Piedmont Natural Gas. They advance our company with their vision, talent, hard work and creativity. These trailblazing women – including a nuclear engineer, astrophysicist and lineman – reveal inspiring stories of persistence, pluck and achievement in largely male-dominated fields. A diverse workplace isn’t just a nice idea, it’s a competitive necessity. Today, meet Erin Schneider, a director of economic development based in Indiana.

Closing the water infrastructure funding gap in the U.S. could result in a $220 billion boost in economic activity, as well as create 1.3 million jobs annually. These findings, and more, were recently released in a new Value of Water Campaign, “The Economic Benefits of Investing in Water Infrastructure.”

Our efforts to reduce carbon emissions were acknowledged in 2016 with our inclusion in the ‘Climate A List’. CDP assessed companies globally from across 10 industry sectors; we were one of only 193 companies (9% of applicants) and seven healthcare companies to be A-listed.

As we learn more about how sustainable building techniques can be used for industrial purposes, we are putting this knowledge into practice with similar projects in the UK, where GSK funding led to the construction of the country’s first ever carbon neutral laboratory in Nottingham.

In 2016, we topped the Access to Medicine Index for the fifth consecutive time since it began in 2008. The index is an independent measure of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies’ efforts to improve access to healthcare in developing countries.

Black & Veatch’s 2017 Strategic Directions: Smart City/Smart Utility Report reinforces lessons learned in the past year—although governments and municipalities believe strongly in the smart city model, they continue to struggle to fund these efforts. According to survey data, only 16 percent of municipalities can self-fund a smart city initiative, a little over a third cannot.

In the Update, Centrica demonstrates how they are responding to the rapidly changing world of energy to give customers what they want – more choice, more control, more affordable energy and increasingly, lower carbon.

The last few years have been transformational for climate diplomacy. In 2015, we witnessed the first legally binding global climate deal with the Paris Agreement, and last year’s COP22 conference saw governments and businesses reaffirm their commitments to sustainable growth. These events, coupled with a groundswell of public pressure, leave no doubt that working toward a low-carbon economy is, and will remain, a priority.

As the newly appointed Chair of the GRI Global Sustainability Standards Board, Judy Kuszewski wants to see a stronger link between sustainability and business strategy, and deeper collaboration between reporting frameworks. Find out more about Kuszewski’s vision about the future of corporate reporting.

Women’s economic empowerment is critical to a sustainable cocoa sector, and a cornerstone of the Cargill Cocoa Promise. Women’s economic wellbeing builds the capacity of the farms, and is directly linked to a more productive crop, increased household income, better-educated children, and enhanced health and nutrition.