BVCA Creating Sustainable Growth Report 2024
This report has been produced by the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (“BVCA”) to reflect on the progress of the industry in relation to sustainability and demonstrate how our members help to build businesses fit for the future.
Discussions on decarbonisation, cybersecurity, biodiversity loss and diversity are now at the top of the global political agenda. The BVCA actively engages with private equity and venture capital firms, policymakers and standard setting bodies to ensure that we have the right political and regulatory environment to enable our members, and others, to invest in and create the businesses of tomorrow.
To support these discussions, the BVCA, along with national partner associations throughout Europe, started an ESG initiative in 2022 to gather data from private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) firms on key Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) metrics. We launched a second edition of the survey in July 2023 to build upon previous research findings and continue to evidence the ESG journey of our members.
For the 2023 data collection cycle, we had 93 BVCA member firms providing data on portfolio level ESG metrics which represents a 23% increase compared to the previous year. Our members provided us with data on almost 2,100 companies, which is a notable improvement in coverage compared to the 1,300 companies analysed in the previous report. Many fund managers also submitted more comprehensive submissions with a greater number of ESG metrics covered across their portfolio.
Disclosure of information on portfolio company and fund level was voluntary. As a result, we do not have the same data point coverage for each company/fund in the dataset over the two data collection cycles.
We are expecting response rates to increase further as businesses develop more efficient ways to track more complex ESG datapoints.
This publication was launched at an interactive webinar session on 26 January. The webinar was moderated by Suzi Gillespie, BVCA Head of Research, and panellists included Harriet Assem, BVCA Head of Sustainability; Maria Carradice, Managing Director, Specialist – Environmental, Social and Governance at Mayfair Equity Partners; Michelle Lamprecht, Head of Corporate Affairs at Cambridge Innovation Capital; and Martin Senk, BVCA Research Manager. Watch the webinar recording here.
