As one of its first deliverables, the GISD Alliance set a common norm for investing in the SDGs. The resulting Sustainable Development Investing (SDI) definition has since been a foundation for much of the alliance’s work.

Through different pilot projects, members have sought to generate guidance in how to apply it to portfolio alignment or product construction. With this in mind, GISD commissioned research on the viability of the definition as a listed equity index.

The resulting report, completed by Prof. Alexander Bassen and other researchers at the University of Hamburg, makes a strong case for such an ‘SDI index’. Using existing data, the researchers were able to translate the definition’s decision tree into an index of global listed equities. Moreover, they found that this index met or exceeded the financial performance of a benchmark index, while at the same time generating higher SDG contributions.

The full report can be found here.