ESG in a time of crisis: Why ESG scores cannot mitigate risk

It quickly became evident, however, that this was not the case. During the initial stages of the pandemic when equity markets fell, the established ESG indexes did not appear to capture the outperformance of ESG that many believed to be there. In fact, over the whole of the first quarter of 2020 the difference in performance between a number of ESG indices and the MSCI World Net index was less than 1%. This was astonishingly small. Particularly given the consensus that ESG would give a company that edge and offer an element of downside protection amid a drastically falling equity mark...