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.
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.
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.
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.