Since the United Nations Global Compact organization first requested financial markets to incorporate the concepts of environment, social, and governance (ESG) into analysis in 2004, over the past 20 years, ESG has transitioned from a niche topic to mainstream discourse. In this process, business evaluation logic no longer solely focuses on financial indicators, as capital markets increasingly pay attention to factors that could potentially impact a company's sustainable development, such as reducing carbon emissions, promoting employee welfare, ensuring ethical standards in the supply chain, enhancing transparency, and board diversity.

According to Bloomberg Intelligence forecasts, the global ESG asset management scale is expected to exceed $40 trillion by 2030. With the vigorous development of ESG investments, more and more investors realize the significant influence of ESG factors on investment returns and risk management. Investors hope to find companies with long-term stable growth potential by evaluating their ESG performance.

Under the influence of this trend, many Hong Kong-listed companies are devoting more efforts to improving their performance in environmental, social, and corporate governance aspects. Taking China Gas Hold, a leading cross-regional comprehensive energy supplier and service provider, as an example, following the upgrade of its ESG rating to BBB by MSCI earlier this year, China Gas Hold recently received good news again. It achieved an excellent score of 64 in the 2024 S&P CSA rating, surpassing 77% of its peers globally, reaching a global leading standard.

China Gas Hold has accelerated in the field of ESG, benefiting from embedding high-standard corporate governance into the company's 'DNA', continuously exploring the 'economy', 'safety', and 'cleanliness' aspects around the energy industry, while also contributing to society from more dimensions and at a deeper level.

In terms of corporate governance, China Gas Hold, starting from top-level design, has established a complete sustainable governance framework: the Group's board of directors and board-level sustainable development committee are responsible for formulating and supervising the group's sustainable development strategic direction and strategy. They also coordinate and supervise ESG and climate-related management work, integrating ESG indicators into senior management value assessment and evaluation to ensure that the group's actions in sustainable development and climate change risk response are consistent with the group's long-term strategy.

In the environmental dimension, as a practitioner safeguarding ecological environment, China Gas Hold has committed to peak carbon emissions by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality in its own operations by 2050. Anchored to this goal, China Gas Hold has systematically constructed an environmental management system, continuously strengthening work in key areas such as energy conservation, emission reduction, biodiversity protection, green finance and climate change response, working together with upstream and downstream partners towards a low-carbon, sustainable, and more resilient future.

It is worth mentioning that, China Gas Hold has successfully passed the evaluation of the United Nations Environment Programme Oil & Gas Methane Partnership (OGMP), reaching the OGMP 2.0 "gold member" standard, fully illustrating the company's increasing recognition by more and more international authoritative organizations for its efforts in environmental protection and carbon reduction.

From a societal perspective, China Gas Hold keeps in mind its mission and actively gives back to society through its business development achievements. On one hand, China Gas Hold enhances its product quality testing system with ingenuity to improve service quality and efficiency. On the other hand, it continues to enhance its safety management system, launching a three-year decisive action plan for fundamental safety production, ensuring gas supply safety by all means. Furthermore, based on the concept of people-oriented, China Gas Hold comprehensively and from multiple angles builds a solid defense line for employees' physical and mental health, establishes a sound communication mechanism and caring and welfare system for employees, continuously conveying corporate warmth and care.

In recent years, esg has become a new trend, reflecting the evolution of investment and business practices from maximizing short-term profits to creating long-term value. In this historic transformation, China Gas Hold has made significant progress in environmental, social, and corporate governance fields. This not only helps China Gas Hold gain recognition from major stakeholders, enhance the company's reputation and social influence, but also attracts more attention from domestic and international capital with good esg performance, injecting new upward momentum into the company's capital markets performance.