In the nine years since we began publishing this annual sustainability report, the discourse around sustainability has matured and evolved, and more recently, become a topic of active public debate. The ongoing discussion is forcing companies to closely examine and clarify what sustainability means to them.
At ICE, years of consistent conversations with our stakeholders, as well as among our colleagues and our Board, has helped us clarify what sustainability means for us.
The topics you will see discussed in this report are ones that we have deemed through careful consideration and input to be relevant for our business. As such, we treat them like any other part of our business strategy. Some issues, such as cybersecurity or ethical behavior, were foundational for our company long before anyone was calling them sustainability. Others, such as efforts to reduce our operational emissions footprint, are newer issues to us that we are refining our approach to each year.
This report largely focuses on our operations – our people, our impact on the climate and how we manage risks to our business. However, that is only part of our approach to sustainability, as we are positioned to have an additional impact through our products and services:
- Price discovery delivered by our exchanges across all forms of energy is instrumental as the economy navigates the energy transition.
- As early investors in environmental trading products, with the acquisition of the Climate Exchange in 2010, we have facilitated the development of a robust secondary market in emissions trading and renewable energy, both critical pieces of global efforts to meet emission reduction targets.
- More recently, we have invested in building our capabilities in providing sustainable finance data, including innovative property-level climate products that are the result of bringing together our data and our mortgage businesses.
- At the NYSE, we bring together sustainability leaders from among our community of over 2,000 listed companies to help those companies at the early stages of their sustainability efforts to develop and advance their goals.
As the conversations around what sustainability is or should be evolve, I look forward to continuing to engage with our stakeholders to keep a firm pulse on what it means for our company and how we can best address the associated risks and opportunities. Thank you for your interest in this report.
