How can sustainable investors further incentivize their portfolio companies to report robust sustainability data and improve their performance on material ESG and impact metrics? Performance-based investing, or impact-linked financing, is the next evolution of the sustainable investing market, and robust, verified data is critical to allow investors to incentivize positive results on quantitative performance indicators. This article visually describes the fundamental building blocks — from materiality assessment for metric selection, to verification techniques for confidence scoring — that are needed to ensure efficient and high-fidelity impact data practices and approaches used to trigger incentive payments. The sustainable investing market is…