Creating Sustainable Growth: Private Capital at Work
This report has been produced by the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (“BVCA”) to demonstrate how our members’ can help to build sustainable businesses fit for the future.
Sustainability issues, especially climate change, biodiversity loss and diversity are now at the top of the global political agenda. The BVCA continually brings together 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 a new initiative to gather data from private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) firms on key Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) metrics. This covers a variety of areas including carbon footprint data, female representation across industries, and adoption of policies to combat bribery and cyber-related risks.
Our aim is to monitor the industry’s performance on ESG issues that are relevant to society and policymakers and report on key trends.
For the 2022 data collection cycle, we had 79 BVCA member firms providing data on portfolio level ESG metrics and 153 member firms providing sustainability regulation data. In total, our members provided us with data on 694 funds and almost 1300 companies. 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. We plan to re-run the survey in future years and expect the response rate to increase as businesses develop their capability to track ESG data.