The Editor’s word

Cary Krosinsky Special Issue of the Journal of Environmental Investing, State of ESG Data and Metrics

It is with great pride that we bring you this issue of the Journal of Environmental Investing, looking for the first time at the State of ESG Data and Metrics, marking our 8th year of publication, and hosted for the first time by two leading academics at Yale, Professors Dan Esty and Todd Cort. My own journey to sustainable investing took me from earlier careers in technology and what is now mostly referred to as big data (we built the original global institutional ownership data one now sees on Bloomberg terminals), towards an eventual goal of ‘let’s take this ownership data on global institutional ownership and add environmental or social metrics’ to see how mutual funds were doing on a comparative basis. This brought me into the formation of the PRI process in 2005, and eventually into the Carbon Tracker Initiative and Trucost, both of which had interest in versions of this concept of mutual fund performance (now moving forward as Real Impact Tracker).