Impact Measurement

About

The credibility of sustainable finance rests on a simple question: does it actually work and if so, how?

Answering that question rigorously — at the level of a company, a fund, or an investor — is one of the most demanding methodological challenges in the field. Impact measurement requires defining what counts, establishing causal links between actions and outcomes, aggregating fundamentally heterogeneous indicators, and doing all of this in a way that is transparent, comparable, and resistant to manipulation.

On topics where standards are still emerging — social impact,  just transition, investor additionality — the difficulty is compounded by the absence of shared frameworks and the risk that measurement becomes a vehicle for impact-washing rather than a genuine management tool.

Mirova Research Center is committed to advancing the methodological frontier in this area — supporting academic research that examines how impact is measured and attributed in practice, contributing to the development of national and international standards for social impact measurement, and co-creating quantitative frameworks that can be applied by investment teams across asset classes.​​​​​​​

Partnerships

CRG-i3 (Ecole Polytechnique)

Mirova Research Center is the industrial host of a three-year CIFRE doctoral research project launched in February 2025 at CRG-i3, École Polytechnique, supervised by Professors Florence Charue-Duboc and Nicolas Mottis.

The thesis, conducted by Axelle Guers, examines the impact indicators used in practice across impact investing — at company, fund, and investor levels — with a particular focus on topics that remain methodologically unsettled: social impact, the just transition, and investor additionality. By studying the real organizational and quantification challenges faced by practitioners, the research aims to produce both academic contributions and practical guidance directly applicable to Mirova’s investment strategies.

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AFNOR/ESSEC

MRC is a founding partner of a collaborative initiative led by AFNOR and ESSEC Business School to develop a French voluntary standard on the rigor of social impact measurement.

Alongside Orange, MAIF, and Malakoff Humanis, MRC participates actively in the working group co-led by ESSEC’s E&MISE laboratory and AFNOR. The initiative aims to define quality criteria for social impact measurement methodologies, establish a common language for assessing methodological robustness, and reduce the risk of impact-washing — with a view to potentially scaling the resulting framework at European level.


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Square Research Center

In 2024–2025, MRC partnered with the Square Research Center to co-develop the Sustainable Development Goals Impact Assessment (SDGIA), an innovative quantitative methodology for measuring the social impact of companies and investment portfolios. The SDGIA structures impact analysis across six steps — from impact declaration to stakeholder-level evaluation — using the SDG framework as a common unit of well-being to enable aggregation and comparability across fundamentally different types of social impact. The resulting methodological guide, published by MRC, represents a significant contribution to the standardization of social impact measurement in sustainable finance.​​​​​​​

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Publications

Impact measurement in the context of impact investing raises three distinct challenges, which we seek to address through the projects conducted in this research area of the MRC.

  • The first is the aggregation of indicators collected at the portfolio company level. For the purposes of steering, decision-making, and reporting, indicators collected at this level can be synthesized. This aggregation raises several questions. When indicators are homogeneous, aggregation appears feasible. When they are heterogeneous, however, it raises challenges of comparability and of aggregation itself.
  • The second challenge concerns the investor's exposure. Once indicators have been aggregated at the portfolio company level, the question arises of what share can be attributed to each investor based on its exposure, i.e., its share of financing. This attribution raises methodological challenges, even though we consider it the most robust approach for reporting and the most relevant for steering impact at the fund level.
  • The third challenge is measuring the investor’s own additionality, which is of a different nature. This challenge no longer concerns the consolidation of indicators, but rather the measurement of the impact the investor generates itself, beyond its share of financing, through its levers of additionality.

Each of our outputs addresses one or more of these challenges:

  • A Framework for Measuring Extra-Financial Performance: this framework structures the three challenges across five levels — level 1 concerns aggregated indicators (challenge 1); levels 2, 3, and 4 concern the construction of attribution (challenge 2); level 5 begins to address the question of additionality (challenge 3). 
  • The Barriers to Aggregating Heterogeneous Impact Indicators addresses challenge 1, taking social impact as an illustrative case, and identifies five structural barriers to comparing and consolidating heterogeneous indicators — independent of the aggregation methodology used. It closes with several avenues for addressing these barriers, calling for greater transparency around the assumptions underlying social impact measurement.
  • Measuring social impact: MRC and Square Research Center introduce the SDGIA methodology also addresses challenge 1, with two distinguishing features: it provides a method for assessing impact at the pre-investment stage through impact estimation, and an aggregation approach based on monetization.

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