Companies rated highly on widely accepted environmental, social and governance metrics pollute just as much as lowly rated companies, research has found.
This perverse lack of correlation holds even if companies’ carbon intensity — their carbon emissions per unit of revenue or market capitalisation — is compared purely to their environmental rating, according to Scientific Beta, an index provider and consultancy.
“ESG ratings have little to no relation to carbon intensity, even when considering only the environmental pillar of these ratings,” said Felix Goltz, research director at Scientific Beta. “It doesn’t seem that people have actually looked at [the correlations]. They are surprisingly low.”