- 01Two tiers of evidence
- 02Sources monitored
- 03From article to event
- 04What counts as a controversy
- 05Severity and confidence
- 06Decay and escalation
- 07How it feeds the ratings
- 08Verification and limitations
- 09Alignment
01Two tiers of evidence
Every record on this site belongs to one of two tiers. The tier is set by the nature of the source, not by how serious the story sounds, and nothing on this page changes a record’s tier except the escalation rule in section 06.
Determinations
Findings by a regulator, court or commitment registry. Each is dated, sourced to the issuing body’s own record, and has been adjudicated by someone with the authority to do so.
- Enforcement notices, fines, consent orders
- Court judgments and final orders; filed proceedings carried alongside, never counted
- Registry status changes (SBTi validation, removal, expiry)
- Counts in full. Can move a company into Exclusions.
Controversies
Allegations reported in the press or by civil society. They are monitored, deduplicated, attributed, scored for severity and confidence, and displayed with their sources.
- Press reporting via Event Registry
- Civil-society and NGO reports
- Never counted as a determination
- Never, on its own, moves a company into any band or into Exclusions
Which reports use which tier.
| Report | Adjudicated | Monitored | How the monitored tier appears |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exclusions and critical findings | Scored | Not used | Determinations only. No controversy of any severity or confidence places a company on this report. |
| Pension fund evidence report | Scored | Annex | Open controversies are listed in a separate “monitored” annex with sources. They do not enter the evidence grade. |
| Portfolio screening | Scored | Flagged | A separate column and drill-down. A holding can carry a flag with no change to its determination-based band. |
| Momentum and trend analysis | Scored | Weighted | Contributes to direction at the capped weight in section 07, labelled as monitored input in the drivers list. |
| Sector and country heatmap | Scored | Overlay | Controversy density is a toggleable overlay, default off. Cell colour is always determination-based. |
| Leaders | Scored | Hold | A candidate with an open Serious or Severe controversy at Corroborated confidence or above is held back from the list until it decays or resolves. It is not excluded. |
02Sources monitored
Named, not counted. Each feed is itself published and auditable. Full source descriptions, refresh cadence and licensing sit on the Data page.
| Source | Role | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Event Registry | Article-level ingestion across global news outlets with outlet metadata, publication time and language. The primary and currently the only live source for the monitored tier. | Live |
| GDELT | Machine-coded global event stream. A second, independent press source, so that corroboration can be measured across feeds rather than within one. Raw project files are fetched now; company matching is being measured on a sample, and nothing from it displays until that clears. | Pilot |
| Business & Human Rights Resource Centre | Company-specific allegations with the company’s invited response recorded alongside. It would suit this tier, since nothing in it fires a band, but it grants no right to reuse its content, so it is not ingested. | Not used |
Languages covered. English in full. French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Japanese and Simplified Chinese are ingested through Event Registry’s multilingual feed and pass through the same pipeline, with one difference: an event whose corroborating outlets are all non-English is capped at Corroborated until a reviewer confirms the attribution (section 08). Languages outside this list are not monitored, and the gap is stated on every affected company record.
Sources on the Data page →03From article to event
The unit this tier scores is the event, not the article. Forty articles about one incident are one event.
- Ingestion. Articles arrive from each source with outlet, timestamp, language and the source’s own entity tags. Every article is stored with its original URL and retrieval time. Nothing is scored at this stage.
- Deduplication. Articles are clustered into a single event when they describe the same incident, involving the same company, within the same window. Syndicated copies of one wire story count as one outlet, not many. Follow-up reporting on the same incident joins the existing event; the outlet count and last-corroborated date update.
- Entity resolution. The event is matched against the same issuer graph the adjudicated tier uses — names, tickers, ISINs and LEIs, with subsidiaries tied to the parent that owns them — before it is attached to any company. An incident at a subsidiary is linked to the listed parent through that chain, and the record shows which entity was named and which is the assessed parent.
- Attribution. Only an event resolved to a graph identifier is attributed. Unresolved events are held, not scored.
A name match alone never attributes an event. A string that resembles a company name is a candidate, not a link. The event is attributed only when the source’s entity tag, the graph identifier and the ownership chain agree; where they do not, it is queued for review and appears on no company record in the meantime. There is no fuzzy name matching here, as there is none in the pipeline above.
04What counts as a controversy
An event is a controversy only if it alleges conduct or harm within one of six themes and names the company as a party to it. Everything else is discarded at classification.
Environmental incidents
Spills, emissions breaches, deforestation, water contamination, biodiversity harm, waste and tailings failures.
Labour and workforce
Fatalities and serious injury, forced or child labour in operations or supply chain, wage theft, union suppression, mass unsafe conditions.
Human rights and conflict zones
Displacement, indigenous consent, security-force abuses, operations or sourcing in occupied or sanctioned territories.
Product and consumer harm
Safety recalls with injury, mis-selling, defective or contaminated products, harmful marketing, deceptive claims to consumers.
Data privacy
Breaches affecting individuals, unlawful processing or surveillance, sale of personal data, failures to notify.
Corruption and governance conduct
Bribery, sanctions evasion, accounting irregularity, market manipulation, executive misconduct, whistleblower retaliation.
Explicitly excluded, so the boundary can be checked:
| Discarded | Why |
|---|---|
| Opinion pieces and editorials | Argument about a company is not an allegation of an incident. |
| Analyst downgrades and rating changes | Third-party opinions of the company, including other ESG raters, are never inputs. |
| Share-price moves and market commentary | Price is a consequence, not evidence of conduct. |
| Litigation threats with no filing | A stated intention to sue is discarded. Once a proceeding is filed, the matter leaves the monitored tier and is carried in the adjudicated tier, uncounted, until decided. |
05Severity and confidence
Every controversy carries a severity band and a confidence band. They are set independently, displayed side by side, and never collapsed into a single score on any report. A serious allegation from one outlet reads Serious / Single-source, and the reader sees both. These are bands, not the 0–100 severity a determination carries; the two are never on one scale.
Severity
The scale of harm alleged, whether the company is the principal actor or a counterparty, and whether a regulator or court has since opened proceedings.
| Band | Requires |
|---|---|
| Minor | Localised harm with no injury or material loss alleged, or the company named as counterparty or peripheral party rather than actor.any one of the above |
| Moderate | Material harm to an identifiable group, with the company alleged as principal actor. No proceedings opened.principal actor + material harm |
| Serious | Widespread or severe harm as principal actor, or any Moderate event where a regulator, prosecutor or court has since opened an inquiry or proceedings.principal actor + (severe harm OR proceedings opened) |
| Severe | Loss of life, irreversible harm, or a documented pattern across sites or years, as principal actor, with proceedings opened.principal actor + (fatality OR irreversible OR pattern) + proceedings opened |
Harm scale is read from the reporting; actor role from entity resolution (named as actor, as counterparty, or by association); proceedings status from the adjudicated tier’s own feeds, never from press reports of them.
Confidence
The number of independent outlets, the quality of those outlets, and whether the company has publicly responded.
| Band | Requires |
|---|---|
| Single-source | One outlet, or several outlets carrying one wire story. No company response on record.≥1 independent outlet |
| Corroborated | Two or more independent outlets reporting the incident separately, at least one in the top outlet tier.≥2 independent, ≥1 top-tier outlet |
| Established | Three or more independent outlets including top-tier, and either a public response from the company (acknowledged, denied or explained) or a civil-society report with a published methodology.≥3 independent, ≥1 top-tier, + (company response OR civil-society report) |
Outlet tiers are separate from the register source tiers on the main page. Top: international wires, national newspapers of record, broadcasters with published editorial standards, specialist trade press with named editors. Regional: regional and local press, established digital outlets. Other: everything else that passes ingestion; counts toward outlet number but never satisfies a top-tier requirement. The list is published on the Data page and versioned.
A company’s denial raises confidence, not lowers it. A public response confirms the company recognises the event as attributed to it. Whether the denial is credible is a matter for the adjudicated tier; the monitored tier records only that the allegation is established enough to have been answered.
06Decay and escalation
This is the mechanism that makes the two-tier claim in section 01 true rather than a slogan. A controversy has one of three futures: it decays on a published curve, it is refreshed by new corroboration, or it escalates into the adjudicated tier — first as a carried filing, then as a determination — and is closed against the record that replaced it.
Decay
Weight over time, by severity band. Exponential, half-life per band, to zero.
| Band | Half-life | Drops off record |
|---|---|---|
| Minor | 60 days | at 6 months |
| Moderate | 120 days | at 12 months |
| Serious | 270 days | at 24 months |
| Severe | 540 days | at 36 months |
The clock starts at the event’s first-reported date and resets to full weight on corroboration from a new independent outlet or a company response. Unlike a determination, which decays on a 48-month half-life and floors at 0.10, a controversy decays to zero: an allegation nobody has repeated is not evidence that ages, it is evidence that evaporates. A record that drops off remains in the company’s history with its sources; it simply stops contributing.
Escalation rule
- An adjudicated record arrives from the tier’s own feeds: a proceeding filed, an enforcement notice issued, a judgment entered, a registry status changed. Press reports that proceedings have begun do not trigger this step. Only the issuing body’s record does.
- It is matched to any open controversy on the same graph identifier, in the same theme, whose incident window overlaps the conduct the record addresses. Match requires all three. Same company and same theme with no overlap in dates is a new matter, and both records stand.
- The controversy is closed with status “escalated” and records the adjudicated record ID it escalated into. Its weight goes to zero from that record’s effective date. It stays visible in the drill-down as history, marked closed, so the reader can see the allegation preceded the finding.
- The adjudicated tier carries the matter from then on. A filed proceeding is carried, never counted, until decided; a decision is scored on the 0–100 severity scale and subject to the band rules on the main page. The controversy’s prior severity and confidence do not transfer.
- If the proceeding is dropped, or the determination later withdrawn or overturned, the adjudicated record is marked as such. The controversy is not reopened. The matter has been adjudicated; the monitored tier has no further role in it.
At any point in time, one underlying matter contributes to a company’s assessment from exactly one tier. Never both, never neither while it is open.
07How it feeds the ratings
Where the monitored tier enters a report at all, it enters at a weight bounded above by the determination it might one day become, and it is labelled as monitored wherever it appears.
| Report | Uses monitored tier | Weight relative to a determination | Display |
|---|---|---|---|
| Portfolio screening | Flag | Not weighted. A flag is a flag; the holding’s band is set by determinations alone. | Separate “Monitored” column with severity and confidence badges; drill-down lists events and sources. |
| Momentum and trend analysis | Direction input | Capped at 0.4× the weight of a determination of matching theme, for a Severe / Established event, scaling down through the bands to 0.05× for Minor / Single-source. Applied to the decayed weight above. | Marked “monitored input” in the drivers list, with its decayed weight shown. |
| Sector and country heatmap | Overlay | Not blended. Density of open Moderate-or-above events per sector-country cell, as a hatched overlay the reader can switch off. | Toggle, default off. Cell colour is always determination-based. |
| Pension fund evidence report | Annex | Zero. The evidence grade is determinations only. | “Monitored controversies” annex listing open events with severity, confidence, sources and decay state. |
| Leaders | Hold | Zero weight; an open Serious-or-above event at Corroborated-or-above holds a candidate back from the list until it decays below Serious weight or escalates. | Candidate shown as “held — monitored” with the event linked. |
| Exclusions and critical findings | None | Not used. | Not shown. |
Absence of controversy is never counted as improvement. A company with no open controversies scores nothing for it. A controversy decaying to zero removes a negative input; it does not add a positive one. Momentum improves only on determinations, targets and emissions, never on quiet.
08Verification and limitations
Most of the pipeline runs without a person in it, and it is right to say so. The steps that carry attribution risk are reviewed, and the known gaps are listed rather than smoothed over.
Automated
- Ingestion, storage and source tagging
- Deduplication and syndication collapse
- Theme classification and exclusion filtering
- Entity resolution where source tag, graph and ownership chain agree
- Outlet counting, outlet-tier lookup, confidence banding
- Decay, corroboration reset, escalation matching and closure
Reviewed by a person
- Every entity resolution where the three signals disagree
- Every Serious and Severe assignment before it displays
- Non-English events before they can exceed Corroborated
- Escalation matches where the incident-window overlap is under 30 days
- Every challenge received
Known gaps.
| Gap | Effect |
|---|---|
| Language coverage | Nine languages are monitored. Reporting in others — most of Africa, South and South-East Asia and the Middle East outside English-language outlets — is not seen until an English or covered-language outlet picks it up. Companies with operations concentrated in uncovered languages carry a stated coverage note. |
| Private subsidiaries | Linkage to a listed parent depends on the ownership chain in the issuer graph. Where a subsidiary is private and its ownership is not in the graph, an incident may resolve to no assessed entity and be held unattributed. |
| Register delay | The escalation rule fires on the issuing body’s record, and those records can lag the event by weeks. In that gap a controversy remains open at its decayed weight even though a filing or determination exists. The trigger is not pulled early on press reporting, by design. |
| Outlet-tier drift | Outlet quality changes. The outlet list is reviewed quarterly and versioned; a confidence band computed under a prior version is shown with that version’s tag. |
| Single live source | Until the GDELT pilot clears its precision check, “independent outlets” means independent within Event Registry’s feed. Cross-feed corroboration is not yet measured. |
How to challenge a record. Any company, or any subscriber, can challenge an attribution, a severity or confidence band, or a failure to close on escalation. Write to records@sustainesg.io with the record ID shown in the drill-down. Challenges are reviewed by a person within ten working days, the outcome and reasoning are written to the record’s history, and a record under challenge is displayed as such in the meantime. Controversy records are derived from third-party reporting and may contain errors, omissions or delays; nothing on this page or in any report is investment advice.
09Alignment
The main Methodology page claims alignment with the ICMA Code of Conduct for ESG Ratings and Data Products Providers. This tier maps to the three principles that bear on it directly.
| Principle | How this tier meets it |
|---|---|
| Transparency of methodology | The tier boundary, the theme list and its exclusions, the severity and confidence bands with their requirements, the decay half-lives, the weight caps and the escalation rule are published here in full and versioned. A change to any of them is dated on this page, and records computed under a prior version carry its tag. |
| Quality of data sources | Sources are named, not counted, each with a stated role and status. Outlet quality is handled through a published, versioned tier list rather than left implicit. Attribution requires agreement between the source’s entity tag, the issuer graph and the ownership chain; a name match alone is never sufficient. Known gaps in coverage are stated on the affected records. |
| Conflicts of interest | No company pays to be assessed, to have a record reviewed, or to have a challenge heard, and the challenge process is the same for a subscriber and for the company assessed. Analyst opinions, other raters’ outputs and market movements are excluded as inputs, so no commercial relationship elsewhere in the market can enter through this tier. Review decisions are written to the record’s history, where they can be inspected. |