Introducing the RavenPack ESG Controversy Scoring Framework

Forming a comprehensive view of a company’s sustainability profile is a genuine challenge. Sustainability data mostly comes in unstructured formats that are difficult to consume systematically, which makes the relevant sustainability signals often go unnoticed by practitioners. As investors are increasingly relying on data-driven processes to achieve scale and efficiency across ESG applications, addressing the data challenge has become the foundational step in any long-standing ESG strategy.

RavenPack’s ESG Controversy Scoring 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.

The approach is based on RavenPack’s event detection capabilities, making the process fully transparent down to the news article. In comparison, packaged ratings from major rating agencies rely on relatively opaque analyst views that are much slower to react to novel news events.

RavenPack’s full event taxonomy is extremely granular and contains nearly 7,400 events, grouped into topics, groups, types, subtypes, and categories, which allows us to achieve high specificity in the measure of controversies. We have identified 171 events from our event taxonomy that represent ESG-related controversies of various degrees.

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Level 0	Level I	Level II	Level III	Level IV
EVENT_CATEGORIES	CONTROVERSY_THEME	CONTROVERSY_GROUP	CONTROVERSY_PILLAR	CONTROVERSY_SCORE
171 Event categories	Airborn Emissions	Environmental Impact	Environment	Final Score
	Biodiversity & Land Usage
	Pollution
	Environmental compliance	Environmental compliance
	Human rights	Community	Social
	Child/forced labor
	Censorship
	Intellectual property
	Animal welfare
	Corporate reputation
	Lobbying
	Opportunity	Workforce
	Layoffs
	Labor conditions
	Anti-Competitive practice	Business Ethics	Governance
	Corruption
	Financial Crimes/Fraud
	Taxes
	Management and board
	Shareholder rights
	Corporate behavior
	Privacy	Consumers & products
	Marketing/Advertising
	Products
	Product Compliance
	Industrial accidents	Accidents	Other
	Legal-Issues	Legal Issues