At the recent annual Who Cares Wins follow-up event in Zurich, with the imposing title "Communicating ESG value drivers at the company-investor interface", discussions centred on whether and which environmental, social and governance issues were actually "material" for companies' business models and which were not.

Listening to the debates we began to wonder whether the long struggle to put sustainable development on investors' agendas had been futile. Here's why.