Coriolis Technologies Newsletter February 2022
It’s hardly right to be saying Happy New Year now, but like many of our clients and stakeholders, we are sitting in the middle of February and wondering what on earth happened to January. We do hope your 2022 has started in exactly the way you wanted it to.
We ended last year with a wake-up call from the COP26 Summit in Glasgow. The target of keeping global warming to 1.5°C as agreed in the Paris Climate Accord will at best be hard to reach. New goals to achieve net-zero by 2050 were set to reduce methane emissions by 30% and to end deforestation by 2030. While these goals are not yet legally binding, 2022 will be the year when climate regulations start to shape the day-to-day operations of businesses as they increasingly have to report on their and their supply chain’s progress towards net-zero in particular. By the end of March, the Sustainability-related Financial Disclosures Regulation (SFDR) will make these regulations mandatory.The SFDR joins with reporting requirement regulations against the EU’s taxonomy for sustainability which are already in place to catalyse a profound change in the way financial institutions view the risks associated with their clients and with their investment portfolios. Put simply, where Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Client (KYC) regulations have shifted their onboarding and compliance processes, the ESG reporting requirements now additionally require a shift in the types of business that they fund and work with. It looks like the biggest structural shift in the way in which businesses and their financial service providers have seen in generations.Yet while all of this is well-known as an imperative for change, what is less well known is how to go about that change. Our Future of Strategy event last year made the need for collaborative action to create global measurement standards quite clear. We realise that regulators have talked a lot about what needs to be measured, but they haven’t really told the banks or the businesses exactly what they should be measuring so that a business or a transaction can be seen to be complying with those regulatory standards. At present, many of the targets are self-reported with two obvious conclusions: first – it is prone to inaccuracy from human error, misrepresentation or misinterpretation, and second, it is not scalable to whole supply chains and individual transactions. Yet this is what is required if the regulations are to avoid the inevitable accusation of greenwash. So what is the objective solution? Read more here. As always, I am unspeakably proud that Coriolis, with its Kosmos partners, is working towards creating these very universal and automated solutions that are so badly needed. In fact, we will be launching these at our next Kosmos Working Group session on the 1st March, so if you are not already a member of that group and would like to be, do contact Amy Chesnutt.In other news, the year has gotten off to an amazing start. We now have 24 people in our company, and have divided our work into three teams – technology, business development and digital; our research function works across all three teams and it is the means by which we keep our products ahead of the biggest trends that emerge in global trade and trade finance.2022 will be defined by everyone’s response to the ESG challenge laid down by COP26. We are honoured to be working with you to create something truly automated, independent and universal in the marketplace and are really excited about engaging with you more during the course of this year.Dr. Rebecca HardingCEO
Watch Rebecca Harding provide an analysis of the geopolitics of Russia and Europe through a trade lens. This weeks video looks at why #Ukraine is so significant to Russia, Russia’s geopolitical role in the global economy, and the importance of Russia’s exports to Europe.The Coriolis Technologies MultiLateral Week analyses trends, economics, and key metrics for global trade.
New modelling from the Exporter Monitor produced by Coriolis Technologies and the Institute of Export & International Trade shows a pick up in January of the 12 month average for the number of businesses exporting from the UK compared to December 2021. It also shows that, compared to December 2021, these businesses increased the numbers of people they employed and that their revenues were also higher. This is partly explained by the impact of businesses holding back from exporting in January 2021 while the new reporting requirements post-Brexit bedded in.
Over the last few years, we have become inured to weaponised language in trade. So when President Biden renewed US tariffs on solar panel imports at the beginning of February, a weary, “here we go again”, sigh of exasperation was forgivable. Nominally the extension of the tariff regime was to boost the US solar panels sector so that it can serve America’s sustainable energy needs in the future, but this was only a part of the point and highlights a much bigger sustainability challenge.Sustainable trade has to be zero-carbon rather than zero-sum, we need to be more strategic in our approach. This means taking our aspirations and goals to deliverable and measurable actions. The problem in sustainability is this: if China is excluded from the global trade system then the process of transition to lower carbon emissions and net-zero will take longer.
In the latest Kosmos Working Group Coriolis technologies presented a more comprehensive solution of its automated ESG scoring system. During the session, a number of items were discussed with the 25+ members including:
Coriolis Technologies is a leading producer of data and analytics for global trade. We provide clear intelligence and insight into trade flows, supply chains and disruptions. But we can’t do this without you! As part of our ‘In conversation with…” webinar series, we are looking for guest speakers, panellists and commentators to analyse the key trends of global trade.If you would like to participate in this series email Kris Makuch for more information.
According to the latest UK Exporter Monitor by Coriolis Technologies and The Institute of Export & International Trade, Northern Ireland exporter numbers increased more than any UK nation in the past month
Is now the moment to call time on measuring ESG? The shortest and most polite answer to this question is a resolute ‘no’. We have no option but to transition away from where we are now to include the ESG that the investment community seems to reject.
Now is undoubtedly the moment where a strategic, and integrated approach to sustainability, economic development and growth, and, sadly, military conflict, needs to be developed by businesses, governments and financial institutions. Trade has a central role to play in this strategy.
