My project connects to the #13 and #17 SDGs: Climate Action and Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions. On climate action, climate change, pollution, and resource depletion are major threats to our planet, and businesses have a crucial role to play in addressing these issues. By incorporating ESG principles into their operations, companies can reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, conserve resources, and protect natural habitats. On Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions, ESG plays a crucial role in promoting social responsibility and equity. Companies that prioritize ESG factors are often more transparent and accountable, with stronger governance structures and processes in place. This can help to prevent corruption and misconduct, and also enhance the reputation and credibility of the company.

While there are many organizations such as Sustainalytics and MSCI that provide ESG ratings, all of these organizations do not provide the data they use to come up with their ESG scores as the data is proprietary. Ironically, there is a lack of transparency from the very organization that is supposed to grade other companies on their transparency among other factors. My project does not calculate ESG ratings, but rather provides all the data necessary from reputable publicly available resources for investors to judge the ESG of the company for themselves. The reason why my project does not calculate ESG ratings is because the weights of the parameters that are used to calculate scores are subjective. Given the same data, funds can come to different decisions about a company’s ESG rating based upon how much weight they give each factor such as whether a company is involved in oil or not. This project used 18 data sets and 52 parameters to collect data on companies in the S&P 500 index.