New data includes environmental and social scores for 252 oil and gas firms, governance scores for thousands more across sectors
The movement to provide additional transparency in the ESG space is gathering pace, and one of the world’s top data providers is joining the bandwagon.
Bloomberg has unveiled its own proprietary system of ESG scores. Available to Bloomberg terminal users, the new scores offer data-driven measures of company ESG performance spanning numerous financial, business, and industry issues, reported Think Advisor.
“ESG data is critical to the investment process,” Patricia Torres, global head of Bloomberg Sustainable Finance Solutions, said in a statement. “By providing transparent ESG data and scores, we are helping investors decode raw data that is otherwise hard to compare across companies.”
The initial offering of data includes environmental and social scores for 252 oil and gas companies, as well as governance scores for over 4,300 companies in multiple industries. The governance scores, which focus on board composition, assesses dimensions such as board diversity, the board composition of corporate management, and possible risks within a board’s structure.
Boards of companies are ranked based on four key areas, including diversity; tenure; over-boarding, or the presence of one board member on too many individual boards of directors; and independence.
Aside from helping investors, Torres said the data offers a “a valuable, quantitative and normalized benchmark” for companies to highlight their own ESG performance, as well as “transparent scoring methodologies and underlying data” for investment and financial professionals to make informed decisions.
Going beyond ESG scores, the intelligence service also offers data-driven insights to support ESG integration, access to news and research, and standardization of data from companies and third parties.
