ESG Controversy Case Study: BP the Gulf of Mexico Oil spill

The “BP Oil Spill”, started on April 20th, 2010 with a fire on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform and led to one of the largest marine oil spills in history. The judicial saga that followed lasted several years, and the total cleanup costs were estimated at $180 billion. Our news-based ESG Controversy Framework captured the different dimensions of the 2010 environmental scandal, as well as other subsequent events, like an industrial fire at a BP refinery in 2012, as follows:

In April 2016 BP paid $20.8 billion in fines, the largest corporate settlement in United States history.

The total penalties and cleanup cost for BP alone were about $65 billion.

It's often difficult to follow all the news to build a complete ESG picture, particularly when events are less reported. Benefits from local and global newswire coverage, RavenPack’s ESG controversy framework gives investors the opportunity to identify companies involved in controversial events reported in local news outlets before the information reaches the mainstream media. Furthermore, RavenPack’s decades-long news archive and global coverage provides investors with the ability to derive insights from a unique source of sustainability signals.

Check out other ESG controversy case studies that have been widely reported, to understand how the RavenPack ESG Ratings framework works, or request a trial to explore how it could help you stay on top of ESG controversies impacting your brands or portfolios.

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About RavenPack ESG Controversy Ratings Framework

RavenPack’s ESG Controversy Ratings Framework is based on real-time detections of events across 40,000+ news sources in 13 different languages. It follows an event-based approach that can help assess the extent of a firm’s ESG controversy exposure through time by monitoring real-time news coverage. Learn More