What this page covers

Every value shown on this site — the composite ESG score, the Level and 12m trend columns, incident counts, severity and persistence words, pillar drivers, the ESG states, and the portfolio check — is explained below in the order you meet it on the site. Where a display uses a shorthand, this page gives the full derivation.

1 · The composite ESG score (0–100)

Each covered company receives one continuous score from 0 to 100, built from four components:

Risk Quality reflects the company's controversy exposure — how many incidents it has, how severe they are, and how recent. Commitment reflects verifiable climate commitments (for example SBTi status), cross-checked against the incident record rather than taken at face value. Clean Record rewards a sustained absence of material incidents. Coverage Depth adjusts for how much independent data exists on the company, so a high score cannot be earned simply by being under-reported. There is no pass/fail step: the score is continuous, and the bands below are read off it.

2 · The three measures and their words

The site describes each company along three separate measures. Each measure has its own vocabulary, and one word belongs to exactly one measure — a page labels the measure it is about, and other measures show as bare numbers.

Level — how good the record is now. Driven by the composite score; band cuts sit at 65 / 57 / 50 / 43, the lower bound of each band inclusive. Recomputed quarterly.

Trend — which way the record is moving over 30 days. Driven by momentum; band cuts sit at ±60 / ±20. Moves whenever incident data refreshes.

Exclusion — whether the company trips a screen. Output of the exclusion screens: Critical / Severe / Elevated / Watch, in descending severity. Exclusion bands follow the screens that produce them.

State words describe the company's measured ESG position under these published thresholds. They are properties of the company in our methodology, not recommendations to any person.

3 · Sector caps

Composite scores in Oil & Gas and Mining are hard-capped at 45; Coal and Tobacco are capped at 35. Caps apply after all other components, regardless of how well an individual company scores on conduct. This is a deliberate product-level exclusion on what a company does, kept separate from the conduct engine that measures how it behaves.

4 · The 12m trend column

Wherever you see 12m trend, it is the change in the composite ESG score over the rolling twelve months, expressed in score points. It is computed from the same incident and commitment inputs as the score itself, so a company's Level and trend can legitimately disagree — a low score can be improving fast (a recovery signal, not a quality signal), and cards flag that divergence explicitly when it occurs.

5 · Incidents, severity, and persistence

Card evidence lines follow one template: Incidents: 12 → 1 · Severity: low · not recurring.

Incidents counts distinct ESG incidents attributed to the company over the trailing 24 months, after deduplication across sources; an arrow (12 → 1) compares the prior year with the most recent year. Severity aggregates per-incident severity and is shown as a word: low (≤10), moderate (11–25), high (26–39), critical (40+). Persistence measures how continuously incidents recur and is shown as: ongoing (persistence ≥ 0.25), easing (0.10–0.25), not recurring (< 0.10). The severity and persistence cut points are the current calibration and are reviewed each quarter.

6 · Signal drivers (Env / Soc / Gov)

Next to each signal you will see Env / Soc / Gov labels showing which ESG pillars that signal draws on. In the current release these come from the company's sector profile rather than from per-company incident attribution — a sector-level starting point, not a claim that every individual incident has been traced to a pillar. Per-company attribution is on the development roadmap, and this section will be updated when it ships.

7 · Quarterly sector call-outs

The five cards on the homepage (Very strong / Strong / Moderate / Weak / Very weak) are sector-level summaries for the current quarter. Each sector's constituent scores and 12-month trends are aggregated; the sector with the strongest positive momentum among adequately covered sectors appears under Very strong, the weakest under Very weak, and the sector whose aggregate score moved least appears under Moderate. The names quoted on each card are the largest individual contributors to that sector's move. If no sector qualifies for a state in a quarter, the card says so rather than forcing a pick.

8 · The portfolio check

The screener resolves each ticker against the covered universe. The portfolio composite is the weighted average of resolved holdings' ESG scores — weighted by position value (quantity × price) when a CSV provides them, equal-weighted otherwise. Unresolved names are listed separately and excluded from both the numerator and the denominator, so they can never silently drag the average. "Gap to Good / Strong" is the distance from your composite to the 57 and 65 band cuts. Exclusion-signal counts show how many holdings sit in the exclusion band; what-if swaps recompute the composite with flagged holdings removed.

9 · Sources and update cadence

Incident data comes from Event Registry, which supplies the 24-month incident history, severity, pillar classification and UN Global Compact flags, together with the live 30-day incident view. Climate commitment data comes from the SBTi registry. Emissions data used in sector, country and company analysis comes from Climate TRACE. Issuer identity comes from a reconciled security master covering names, tickers, ISINs and LEIs.

These sources update on different cadences, so the site makes no single global "last updated" claim. Composite scores and the level words read off them are recomputed quarterly. Trend is a 30-day measure and moves whenever incident data refreshes. Exclusion bands follow the screens that produce them.

Limitations

Incident data carries media-coverage bias: well-covered companies accumulate more recorded incidents than poorly covered ones with similar conduct. Scores reflect reported controversy exposure and verifiable commitments, not a complete picture of ESG performance. Sector-level pillar tags are a prior, not per-incident attribution. Coverage varies by region and company size. Everything published here is research — a description of how companies measure under a stated methodology. None of it is investment advice or a personal recommendation to any person.