PwC Greece: Consolidates its leadership role in sustainable development and ESG issues

PwC Greece confirms its leading role in matters of sustainable development, compliance and expansion of ESG criteria, announcing its collaboration with the internationally renowned professor and economist, Phoebe Kountouri.

This is an important partnership linked to PwC’s global strategy, “New Equation”, which has as its main pillars building trust and achieving sustainable results. Under the “New Equation”, PwC’s goal is to make a practical contribution to solving important social issues with a vehicle – the skills, knowledge and talent of its people. In addition, it has been a signatory to the UN Global Compact (UNGC) since 2002 and takes substantial action to promote the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

At the same time, through the provision of holistic ESG services, it actively contributes to the ESG transformation of the market both locally and globally, leveraging the collective knowledge and experience of its people, bringing together skills from the full range of consulting, auditing and its tax services. In this light, it offers its customers and partners the possibility to access an expanded “reservoir” of knowledge, best practices and examples that they can apply in their businesses.

The goal of the new collaboration is to further strengthen this “reservoir” of knowledge and accelerate efforts to incorporate ESG criteria by Greek businesses as a reliability factor and a condition for their sustainability. Together, the two sides, leveraging their global knowledge and experience, will implement a series of actions and initiatives that will have an extremely significant impact on the partners and clients of PwC Greece, helping them to prepare to face the challenges brought by the new reality.

Phoebe Kountouri is a world-renowned professor of environmental economics and a global leader in sustainable development. It is widely recognized as a pioneer in innovative, human-centered, interdisciplinary systems for the sustainable interaction between nature, society and economy. She is included in the 1% of most cited women economists in the world as well as in the official Stanford University list of 2% of the world’s scientists. He is an elected member of the Board of Directors of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences (WAAS), a Member of the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea) and a member of the Nomination Committee for the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. She has received multiple distinctions for her research work both in Greece and internationally, including the prestigious grant, Synergy, of the European Research Council (ERC).

At the local level, in recent years PwC, a strategic partner of Greek companies in ESG matters, has invested – and continues to do so – in strengthening and training its teams as well as in the development of digital tools that facilitate companies in monitoring and record of their performance. At the same time, it utilizes the experience and know-how of the global network in order to help improve them and strengthen the confidence of investors, the market and other interested parties.

Marios Psaltis, CEO of PwC Greece said: “It is with great pleasure that we announce our collaboration with Phoebe Kountouri. I am sure that with her assistance we will accelerate even more our effort to inform Greek businesses and also to encourage their meaningful response in matters of sustainability and ESG.The use of Sustainable Development and ESG principles is gaining more and more financial importance for the companies themselves, since increasingly their performance on ESG indicators is linked to their ability to raise capital, but also their financial performance. It is important that organizations perceive these issues as a vehicle for securing competitive advantage and take action to adopt a new management model where ESG principles are integrated into their strategy and operations. Toward this end, we focus the sharing our actions, aspiring to offer even greater value to our people, our customers, the market and society as a whole”.

In the same vein, Professor Phoebe Kountouri notes: “This collaboration aims to enrich the already existing, significant footprint of PwC Greece in the sustainable transition of Greek businesses. Our main aim is to support companies to integrate ESG (Environmental Criteria , Social and Corporate Governance) and SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations) in their business plan, with the recognition that the transition to sustainability presupposes the financial viability of the business and at the same time offers a wide range of profitable investment opportunities. Given the stormy change of institutional framework provided by the European Green Deal and the unprecedented technological progress in sustainable green and digital solutions, the companies that will transform by adopting these solutions more immediately, will be the ones that will survive and have the greatest profitability”.