Sustainable Finance & Socially Responsible Investment

Understanding personal values of CEOs informs employees and investors about a company’s commitment to ethics and corporate social responsibility. In a paper titled “Relation between personal values of CEOs and their commitment to corporate social responsibility”, Professor Erhemjamts and her student Sarah Maher examined corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings of S&P500 companies along with social capital of the states their CEOs grew up in.

KeyBank’s Community Development Lending & Investing (CDLI) group announced today it has provided $54.5 million to construct 256 4% LIHTC units at Puget Park, a fully affordable multifamily housing development in Everett, WA, 30 miles north of Seattle. The property will serve residents who earn 60% or less of the area median income.

On January 26, 2017, TD Securities acted as a joint lead for the Province of Ontario’s third – and largest – green bond. At $800 million this is the largest issuance of a Canadian dollar green bond to date.

Today is World Wetlands Day – a day honoring a global treaty to conserve and sustain wetlands. So, what does that have to do with an automotive company?

The FCA US headquarters in Michigan boasts more than 100-acres of natural wetlands, and has since breaking ground 25 years ago.

The UPS Foundation, which leads the global citizenship programs for UPS (NYSE: UPS), announced it is awarding grants totaling more than $2.3 million to non-profit organizations to increase global volunteerism. Grants will support initiatives to bolster global communities, including disaster preparedness and recovery, youth literacy and skills development and veterans training.

As the communication technologies leveraged by the public safety sector advance, the intersection with smart city initiatives becomes all the more inevitable. Technological advances afforded by broadband long-term evolution (LTE) networks have changed how first responders, city and county officials, public agencies and transportation fleets communicate and gather data to better serve their communities. Learn more in the Black & Veatch 2017 Strategic Directions: Smart City/Smart Utility Report.

As governments consider where to spend their smart city funding, they may initially center on the critical building blocks of a smart city but often become subject to short-term budget priorities. To this point, responses to the 2017 Strategic Directions: Smart City/ Smart Utility Report survey suggest a vexing conundrum: What comes first, the budget or the plan?