Project Summary

European Commission now requires extensive reporting of sustainability performance from the largest 10,000 companies in the EU and any external companies with large business operations in the EU, according to recently revised Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). Currently, companies determine themselves what information is significant or ‘material’ for their sustainability disclosure, e.g. they would decide whether the risks due to environmental issues need reporting. Investors use this disclosure information to decide about whether to invest in a company. There is no universally accepted third party methodology to determine rigorously what is ‘material’ for sustainability disclosure. This proposal seeks to address this urgent gap in the market. 

Mettle Capital is a UK-based company which collects, machine reads and analyses open-source data related to ESG factors, on more than 10,000 companies across the world. In recent past, Mettle Capital and Prof Date developed a novel method for quantifying and using news sentiment to enhance financial forecasting. We will use this experience to develop algorithms for (i) quantifying the news sentiment information about various sustainability issues material for any individual company, (ii) correlating this information to share price and (iii) carrying out feature importance analysis to rank materiality drivers for a company.

Project team