Rising inequality: a global sustainability challenge that needs our attention

“What we take for granted might not be here for our children.”

—Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth

“Whether the future is wonderful or terrible is, in part, up to us.”

—William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future

Lag times are perhaps a feature and not a bug in the way humans build consensus around important ideas. In 2006, when An Inconvenient Truth was released, one of us was 10 years into his career as a wildlife biologist, but until seeing the movie he hadn’t thought deeply about climate change. Of course, the documentary—and Al Gore’s tireless ringing of the alarm bell ever since over global warming—proved to be something like the stone that starts the rockslide in our collective recognition of climate change as a systemic risk. It was a slow-moving rockslide, of course. Ten long years later—which included Global Financial Crisis years and its cleanup—we saw the Millennium Development Goals give rise to an elaboration of climate change and nature-related objectives in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement coming into force in 2016.

In the ensuing period, we’ve gradually come to a more broad-based recognition that climate change isn’t the only systemic risk we must deal with. There’s also nature loss, driven by deforestation, unsustainable agriculture, pollution, and water scarcity. And so in 2021, The Dasgupta Review, commissioned by the U.K. government, drove home a second inconvenient truth: As Dasgupta writes in the report’s preface:

“… the Review is an investigation into a larger concern, in that it reconstructs  contemporary growth and development economics and the economics of poverty by recognizing that the human economy is embedded in nature, it is not external to nature.”

We’ve since made some progress down the path of taking the nature-related aspect of this statement to heart, and we think a more meaningful diagnosis of the “economics of poverty” is next on the list for corporate transparency.

As a working group member of the Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures (TISFD), we feel assured that companies will soon have a clearer path before them that will help them provide that transparency. First, they’ll have access to better guidance on how to disclose the financial and impact materiality of inequality, defining how their growth and inequality are intertwined. And second, they may begin to see that it’s in their power to decouple those factors, to demonstrate they don’t seek growth at any cost, and most of all, intentionally not at a human cost.

Inequality is everywhere

Over the past four decades, we’ve seen a broad trend of rising inequality, similar to how climate change has intensified and nature loss has accelerated. This is visible through a number of lenses. The World Inequality Database, for example, maps a startling expansion in the gaps between the top and bottom income earners in the United States.

As it turns out, the bottom 50% of income earners have been increasingly disenfranchised, with this group’s share of total income falling steadily since the 1980s and then plunging steeply through the COVID pandemic, ending in 2022 at roughly half its 1980 level. In the same period, the top 1% saw its share of income double, seeing an enormous boost during the COVID years in contrast to the bottom half’s rapid descent.

Gender inequalities remain considerable as well. At the global level, women’s share of total income from work neared 30% in 1990 and stands at less than 35% today. This is a small increase for a 20-year period, and it translates into significantly lower pay: “Women were paid 21.8% less on average than men in 2023, after controlling for race and ethnicity, education, age, and geographic division,” reports the Economic Policy Institute. At this rate, women can expect to be paid equal to men in perhaps another 40 years.

It's important to note that global wealth inequalities are even more pronounced than income inequalities. Wealth measures much more than income, including home ownership, investments, savings, and the transfer of intergenerational wealth, which tends to deepen the wealth inequality gap. The poorest half of the global population barely owns any wealth at all, possessing just 2% of the total. In contrast, the richest 10% of the global population owns 76% of all wealth. This profound difference is starkly visible, once again, in the United States.

But wealth inequality viewed from this level doesn’t tell you the most relevant story, at least not about the United States. Looking further, data from the Urban Institute also shows a remarkable stratification of inequality when viewed through the lens of race and ethnicity.

As the data shows, Black, Hispanic, and non-Asian/nonwhite communities in the United States have long experienced disproportionate wealth inequality, and this asymmetry is widening. With political and socioeconomic division high on the list of risks that undermine democratic institutions’ continued proper functioning, trends in wealth inequality don’t bode well for U.S. society.

The risks are systemic and material

The foregoing illustrations point to a broad socioeconomic fracturing of contemporary society, which we see as a recipe for intensifying economic and social disruption. Unfortunately, if history is any guide, this is likely to include many forms of injustice. Rising inequality and related disparities and anxieties not only affect individual happiness, prosperity, and sense of belonging and community but increasing wealth inequality can precipitate other forms of inequality, leading to a cycle that builds on itself. Ultimately, inequality becomes multifaceted and intergenerational, cutting across the dimensions of education, wealth, health, and well-being.

If the spread of such injustice wasn’t enough reason to push for policies that could help define and address inequality’s root causes, the economic and political arguments underscore the imperative. As has been observed by a broad spectrum of economic researchers, inequality:

• Limits productivity and innovation: Consider research from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, which sees an important signal of the economic imbalance in terms of intergenerational accumulations of patents and a decline in financial risk-taking among middle-class Americans.
• Constrains growth: As the IMF has documented, given that the benefits of growth are generally not distributed equally across a population, then understanding the distribution of income is critical as well. And from this study, poverty is shown to limit growth over the long term.
• Breeds political instability: The United Nations has pointed out the socioeconomic ripple effects of inequality threaten more convulsive change. High levels of inequality “discourage skills accumulation, choke economic and social mobility, and human development and, consequently, depress economic growth. It also entrenches uncertainty, vulnerability and insecurity, undermines trust in institutions and government, increases social discord and tensions and trigger violence and conflicts.”

Rising inequality is a systemic risk that stymies growth, weakens development across generations of affected communities, and contributes to the broader disintegration of social cohesion and human rights. Around the world, we see increasing evidence of this deterioration, where people fail to enjoy the right to a clean and healthy environment, the right to an adequate standard of living, and the right to equal access to technology. We also see trust in key institutions eroding, and social movements are gaining in strength and volatility—movements that don’t always result in measured, respectful confrontations with authorities. Social unrest linked to economic conditions has been well documented, and not just in the United States, but in many countries, developed and emerging.

What is to be done?

Despite the daunting nature of inequality as a systemic risk, we don’t view it as inevitable or unstoppable. Indeed, we see it as potentially within our collective control, particularly if we coordinate efforts. Fortunately, we can apply some of the same tools to address rising inequality that we’ve used to take action on mitigating climate change and the risks of nature loss.

As with climate and nature loss, it may feel daunting to find a starting point. The approach we’ve taken—and which informs important frameworks such as the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD)—is to break the systemic risk down into simpler steps that can lead toward concrete action. In short, inequality becomes a more tractable problem if we:

1. Define the material impact: From a company’s perspective, it’s important to first identify affected groups and how a company may affect each of them in terms of inequality. This may include employees, customers, vendors, and communities. This can begin with a human rights risk and impact assessment in line with established frameworks to identify and understand the connections between business and people. This is easier from the point of view of a single entity’s operations and more difficult when it comes to larger supply chains, but the principle is the same.
2. Diagnose the material impact pathways: The second stage is to better understand these connections and explore opportunities to avoid harm and create value for people. This could involve engagement with vendors, portfolio companies, and industry associations, including, for example, the evaluation of scenarios for different approaches to hiring, compensation, and supply chain practices. Here, we can point to the World Benchmarking Alliance’s recent announcement of a new Social Benchmark. This assessment of the world’s 2,000 most influential companies shows that most companies are missing opportunities to help mitigate inequality as a systemic risk—and are failing to meet common societal expectations around human rights.
3. Disclose the risks and the opportunities: We can’t manage what we don’t measure. Consequently, we believe it’s imperative that we track relevant inequality and social impact metrics—quantitative and qualitative—and communicate risk exposures and efforts to mitigate the same. This is where we believe the new framework to be developed by the TISFD will prove to be an important milestone. The working group is set to launch the task force itself this month, and the ensuing two-year development of the TISFD’s framework may ultimately shift the paradigm toward acknowledging rather than overlooking inequality as a systemic risk. Taking its cue from the TCFD and the TNFD, the TISFD framework is expected to offer guidance on setting targets that market participants can work toward to mitigate inequality and establish metrics for judging progress.

The TISFD working group has proposed seven key elements for public feedback. These proposals outline what could become the final framework’s:

1      Thematic scope: The framework will address the broad and interconnected issues of social inequality and its impact on human rights, well-being, climate change, and financial stability.

2      Materiality approach: The framework will represent disclosure recommendations that consider both financial materiality (information relevant to investors) and impact materiality (information relevant for understanding an organization's impact on people and the environment). Furthermore, the framework may enable an exploration of the overlap between these materiality perspectives and the systemic financial risks posed by inequality.

3      Alignment with international standards of conduct: The TISFD will work to align its framework with international standards such as the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises.

4      Interoperability with existing standards and frameworks: The TISFD will seek to strengthen existing standards and collaborate with standard-setting bodies like the International Sustainability Standards Board and Global Reporting Initiative. It’ll build on existing indicators and metrics while adapting to the specificities of inequality and social-related issues.

5      Proposed outputs: The framework is intended to be a global disclosure framework, meaning it’ll provide users with conceptual foundations, a body of evidence on impact and risk, guidance on metrics and targets, and capacity-building resources.

6      Intended outcomes and impacts: The ultimate goal of the TISFD is to reduce financial risks, improve financial stability, and deliver better outcomes for people. This includes greater understanding and management of social and inequality-related impacts by companies and financial institutions and embedding TISFD recommendations into global reporting standards and laws.

7      Gaps and weaknesses in metrics and indicators: The TISFD working group recognizes well-known gaps in meaningful and decision-useful metrics for social and inequality-related impacts and expects the task force will continue to refine these over time in collaboration with framework supporters.

Source: TISFD working group. For illustrative purposes only.

Throughout our participation in the TISFD working group, we believed that the disclosure framework itself will help push matters of inequality into the limelight of asset owners’ sustainability concerns. We also realized that the regulatory backdrop could potentially accelerate the process. Canada, for example, recently enacted its Fighting Against Forced Labour and Child Labour in Supply Chains Act, which imposes reporting obligations on government institutions and a wide range of private and publicly owned entities that produce, purchase, or distribute goods in Canada. Another major example can be seen in the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), which will legislate human rights and environmental due diligence and transition plan requirements on firms in scope, including large multinationals doing business in Europe. The CSDDD has been called an “important first step to govern global value chains in more sustainable and just ways based on hard law provisions,” opening the door “for one of the world’s largest single markets to bring in a legally mandated standard of how companies carry out supply chain due diligence.”

At the least, inequality conceived as a direct or indirect economic risk or as a risk to a business’s license to operate could well become the next area of stewardship activities aligned with broad asset owner interest. The TISFD framework couldn’t emerge soon enough, and we encourage its advancement to help financial market participants take action on addressing rising inequality—and using the power of the financial sector to help foster equitable prosperity and growth. It’s as much an economic imperative as it is a moral one.