One serious issue that has plagued investing using environmental, social and governance (ESG) inputs is the lack of quality data and measurement tools. Investors naturally want sustainability performance data that are linked to financial performance and that can be useful for making investment decisions. Oddly enough, the push for these data improvements are coming from the accounting field. We think of ESG factors as important precursors to balance sheet events, things that are clearly important to a company’s stock future stock price that don’t necessarily show up on balance sheet. The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) is taking on the challenging task of quantifying these inputs. SASB, much like FASB has done over the past 40 years, is focused on defining industry-specific reporting standards to allow for easier comparison and benchmarking of companies across sustainability issues. If SASB succeeds, we may soon be seeing these standards integrated into public company filings with the SEC. Given the fact that SASB is a market-driven response to the demand for this kind of information, we think they have a pretty good chance of pulling it off.