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This chapter considers the concept of socially responsible banks through multiple theoretical lenses and from recent empirical evidence. Simply put, socially responsible banks incorporate business ethics and various economic and civic responsibilities into their daily operations. They integrate corporate social responsibility into their lending and decision-making processes, enabling them to develop close relationships and strengthen their social trust with a broad range of stakeholders, including customers, investors, and local communities. Accordingly, they can lay the groundwork for combining their medium- and long-term market presence and highlight their essential contributions to environmental quality and society.

Bloomberg provides timely, reliable and actionable information on sustainability-related financial risks and opportunities for leading business, finance and policy professionals to use in investing, lending, insuring, strategy, and policy decisions…

The Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB) is a non-profit organization that works to provide decision-useful environmental information to markets via mainstream corporate reports. The mission of CDSB is to create the enabling conditions for material climate change and natural capital information to be integrated into mainstream corporate reporting. It is committed to advancing and aligning the global mainstream corporate reporting model to equate natural capital with financial capital. CDSB aims to achieve its mission by offering a framework for reporting environmental information with the same rigor as financial information.

The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) is an independent nonprofit organization that sets standards for companies to use when disclosing Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) information to investors. SASB standards help companies publicly report consistent and comparable information about how they manage issues related to climate change, natural resource constraints, technological innovation, population growth, and more. As a result, the SASB standards enable investors to better understand how a company impacts — and is impacted by — a changing world. With this information in hand, investors can direct their capital to those companies that are being managed most effectively for the long term.

Ghana is one of the world’s largest cocoa producers and supplies most of the global chocolate manufacturers. However, the vital role that the country plays in the chocolate industry has come at a cost in terms of human and environmental problems which have led to deforestation and child labor. Although chocolate manufacturers are implementing new strategies to solve these ESG issues, the results have been incomplete in terms of their effectiveness. This chapter seeks to understand how firms can generate social and financial benefits while tackling ESG issues through the application of Moon’s (2012) CSO framework. It examines the case of the global chocolate manufacturer Fuji Oil Holdings Inc. and its sustainable procurement activities in Ghana. The research investigated how the company is tackling ESG issues by applying the CSO framework. While it shows that there is a high compatibility between the company’s implemented activities and CSO, the results illustrated in ESG and sustainable reports should be improved to better understand their outcomes. The paper provides empirical examples to tackle ESG issues through CSO and contributes to introducing a framework (CSO) other than Porter and Kramer’s (2011) CSV, which is currently widely employed in academia.

The idea behind the optimal ESG portfolio (OESGP) is to expand the mean–variance theory by adding the portfolio ESG value (PESGV) multiplied by the ESG strength parameter γ (which is the investor’s choice) to the minimizing objective function [26,27]. PESGV is assumed to be the sum of portfolio constituents’ weighted ESG ratings that are offered by several providers. In this work, we analyzed the sensitivity of the OESGP based on the constituents of the Dow Jones Index to the ESG ratings provided by MSCI, S&P Global, and Sustainalytics. We describe discrepancies among various ESG ratings for the same securities and their effects on the OESGP performance. We found that with growing γ, the OESGP diversity and Sharpe ratio may monotonically decrease. However, the ESG-tilted Sharpe ratio has one or two maximums. The 1st maximum exists at moderate values of γ and yields a moderately diversified OESGP, which can serve as a criterion for optimal ESG portfolios. The 2nd maximum at large γ corresponds to highly concentrated OESGPs. It appears as if the portfolio has one or two securities with a lucky combination of high returns and high ESG ratings.