FAQs
How will ESGAI be monetized?
ESGAI will be productized as a dashboard, API, and/or data share. Revenue will come from a subscription to one or more of these products.
What makes greenwashing so bad?
Greenwashing is when a company makes themselves look better by providing misleading information about the environmental impact of their company. This may come as blatant falsehoods, twisted facts, or exaggerated claims. Greenwashing is often a part of advertisements but can also present as targeted releases when a company’s reputation is tarnished. By relying on a false impression of a company, investors may be unknowingly supporting bad ESG practices.
What prevents a company influencing the algorithm with greenwashing?
One of the benefits of ESGAI is that it doesn’t use a company’s release of data; it uses reputable news sources that interpret the information through a consumer lens. Journalists who read a company’s releases not only convey the information, but they add on an interpretation.
For example, say Company A was just fined for polluting a river. In hopes of preventing any negative activity from being reported, they widely publish an initiative to reduce their company’s pollution. Good journalists will often see through such greenwashing and can investigate what the scope of the company’s “reduction” is and also report the fine for pollution.
How do we know the news sources used are trustworthy?
Reliability of news stories vary by publisher and is definitely a problem. Currently, you can filter the articles by publisher. For instance. if you only want to see the articles by BBC, you can use the searchable filter on the left sidebar.
In the future, ESGAI will filter out any questionable publishers or fake news sites before calculating scores (this can be done using preexisting algorithms). In addition, a weighting will be applied to sources based on their historical credibility.
What differentiates ESGAI from other ESG investing tools?
ESGAI takes into account news stories from independent publishers, reducing the risk of greenwashing. In addition, we provide individual scores for the social, environment, and governance aspects. The interactive dashboard lets you do your own investigating to granularity you desire. Finally, it provides similar companies that you may want to invest in.
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