Stock exchange, sustainability is still fashionable among listed companies in Italy

Esg strategies are alive and well in Piazza Affari. This is what emerges from the Consob study on non-financial statements (NFDs) published in 2023 by listed companies. One figure for all that highlights this trend: the definition of the most relevant sustainable issues (so-called material issues) in relation to their business involved, in 66.7% of cases, the boards of directors; this is the highest percentage since 2019, the first year of Consob's monitoring of DNFs.

The authority's survey covered 144 companies listed on Piazza Affari of the 202 on the list at the time: 140 obliged by the 2016 Dnf regulation and 4 voluntary; they therefore represent 71.3% of the total number of listed companies and 96.7% in terms of capitalisation. All companies used the Global Reporting Initiative (Gri) reporting standard. Furthermore, in 115 cases, companies referred to at least one of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in relation to their green objectives or linked them to the material issues identified. Finally, the analysis of the documents of the 144 companies revealed that in 90% of the cases, the auditor who issued the attestation on the Dnf was the same as the auditor in charge of the statutory audit of the financial statements.

In the face of a regulatory requirement for green reporting, many companies initially limited themselves to doing the bare minimum. Since the 2023 NfD, in spite of the wave of scepticism coming from the United States on sustainable finance issues, there is instead greater involvement at all levels. In addition to the board of directors, there is a greater presence in the decision-making of external stakeholders, i.e. stakeholders such as suppliers "whose views were taken into account when identifying material issues by 69.7% of the issuers who updated the analysis (65.8% in the previous survey). In all cases where participation was noted, the percentage (over 90% in 2023) of companies reporting information on how they were involved also increased'.

Another relevant element is the increase in the number of sustainability committees, as shown by the corporate governance reports published in 2023. "The number of companies," the report states, "that have established a sustainability committee has also increased. Among those that have also published a Dnf were 108, or 75 per cent of the total, compared to around 70 per cent in the previous year'.

Among the key elements to understand whether a company is serious about ESG are its remuneration policies. Linking managers' remuneration to sustainability indicators makes all the difference. Here too, the data collected by Consob are comforting: "There were 137 issuers that integrated non-financial factors into the remuneration of managing directors, an increase compared to 2022, when there were 127 companies that linked them to ESG parameters. In particular, the reference to such parameters concerns short-term remuneration in 118 cases and the long-term component in 88 cases'.