Sustainable investing

Sustainable investing is an approach that factors environmental, social, and governance considerations, often shortened to ESG, into investment decisions alongside traditional financial analysis. This can range from simply avoiding certain industries to actively favoring companies with strong sustainability practices.

Supporters argue that companies managing these factors well tend to carry less long-term risk, while critics argue ESG scoring can be inconsistent between providers and does not always correlate cleanly with financial performance. Either way, it has become a large and widely referenced category of investing.