Net Zero – what’s behind the climate neutrality claim?
More and more companies are claiming “climate neutrality”. But what does this and the popolar synonym “net zero” mean? Can corporate activities really be climate-neutral or is the offsetting of CO2 emissions guilty of greenwashing? Many companies are talking about it – and are promising even more. The Dutch oil company Shell wants to become […]
Is the EU Taxonomy Already a Failure?
Starting this year, large listed companies in the EU are supposed to determine their own sustainability level according to the specifications of the so-called EU taxonomy. But the initial results are sobering: more than a third state that exactly 0% of their own sales are sustainable. Will they soon be left behind in terms of […]
Focus on ESG: Food
The food industry is responsible for more than a quarter of global CO2 emissions – and thus plays a key role in the fight against climate change. The bad news: reducing CO2 in food production is much more difficult to accomplish than in other industries. But the good news is that there’s already numerous approaches […]
Coming Up: CSRD
At present, just little over 500 listed companies, insurance providers and banks in Germany are subject to legal ESG reporting requirements. But in a few years, this number will increase almost thirty-fold to over 15,000 entities. We explain why this is the case and what the planned regulation is supposed to look like – doing […]
How ESG Ratings Make the Capital Markets More Inefficient
The market for ESG investments is still a Wild West in which most of the times the law of the jungle prevails: Those who report more on ESG are also rated better by ESG rating agencies. Small- and mid-cap companies with limited resources are at risk of being left behind – unless they also start […]
Focus on ESG: E-Commerce
E-commerce continues to boom and is increasingly displacing traditional sales outlets. But with new online sellers come new problems: CO2-intensive shipping, data security concerns, opaque supply chains – how are e-commerce companies responding? At first glance, everything looks clean at Germany’s major listed e-commerce companies. In 2020, Zalando itself consumed 9,621t of CO2, Delivery Hero […]
What are ESG Ratings and who is behind them?
ESG rating agencies aim to assess how sustainable companies are. The aim is to make ESG performance more comparable for investors so that they can use their money more effectively in a sustainable way. But are the rating agencies really achieving their goal? Their judgments are feared – or coveted. They play a decisive role […]
The 5 Most Important ESG Indicators
The list of ESG requirements from a wide variety of sources is long and growing – and varies greatly from industry to industry. Let’s therefore limit ourselves to the five most important quantitative ESG indicators for every company. Companies that can reliable report on those five have made an important first step. Rating agencies like […]
WTF: The last ESG rating you’ll ever need
ESG ratings: there’s clearly too many of them. With the new What The FUture (WTF) ESG rating, we’ve created a rating that makes all the others obsolete – by combining their most convincing features with the BEST methodology. Companies and investors worldwide are complaining about the plethora of ESG ratings. In 2020, The World Business […]
Focus on ESG: Pharma
Can companies quantify their own ESG impact on the environment and society? Two major pharmaceutical companies say yes – and could point the way to an even more complex ESG accounting future. It is easy to lose track of all the units out there in the ESG ecosystem: t CO2e / k €. MWh / […]