AfE 2024
The rapid growth in the number of environmental, social and governance-data providers is good news, according to Yannick Ouaknine, head of sustainability research at Societe Generale’s Bernstein Group. This is mostly because the investment being made by serious data providers is a sign that the shift to embedding these metrics is becoming universally accepted.
However, a greater plurality in third-party providers can create more work for ESG businesses at banks. SocGen needed to put in 1,800 hours of work on a recent project that analysed different data sets provided by vendors around companies’ Scope 1,2 and 3 emissions.
As well as identifying which providers are best for various countries and industries, the project helped clarify the need for banks such as SocGen to add in its own intelligence to models that supposedly already use artificial intelligence for carbon reporting.
“SBTI [Science Based Targets Initiative] is a linear projection of future emissions based on backward-looking trends – so data providers will publish that a specific company needs to reduce by 8% a year, for example, to achieve the net-zero carbon targets they have adopted,” says Ouaknine.
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