SEC Maintains Focus On ESG Disclosure Issues

Last week, one of the primary topics at the July 7th meeting of the SEC's Asset Management Advisory Committee was ESG disclosures. Indeed, according to the discussion draft of the relevant subcommittee, certain specific recommendations were made:

• that "the SEC take steps to foster meaningful consistent, and comparable disclosure of material environmental, social, and governance (ESG) matters by issuers"
• that the SEC "encourage issuers to adopt a framework for disclosing material ESG matters and to provide an explanation if no disclosure framework is adopted" as this would "foster meaningful, consistent, and comparable disclosure"
• that "the SEC initiate a study of third-party ESG disclosure frameworks for the disclosure of material ESG matters to assess whether the frameworks could play a more authoritative role in the future"