Today Robeco announced the inclusion of its Country Sustainability Rankings in the Sustainable Investing (SI) Open Access Initiative, a platform that was launched last year and that opens up Robeco’s SI Intellectual Property (IP) to a group of academics and clients. Stakeholders had already gained free access to Robeco’s proprietary Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) scores, which measure a company’s contributions to the UN SDGs. The project, now in its second phase, expands that platform to the Country Sustainability Rankings (CSR), Robeco’s tool for turning in-depth analysis across a range of ESG data – from climate change to income inequalities, corruption and innovation – into a single country ESG score.
By focusing on relevant ESG factors, Robeco’s country sustainability assessment offers a comprehensive view into a country’s strengths and weaknesses that complements traditional sovereign risk analyses which have tilted towards macro-economic and debt-sustainability variables. Traditional sovereign risk analysis, however, is insufficient for capturing and distilling all the risks that can potentially disrupt an economy and threaten a sovereign’s solvency. Events such as past sovereign defaults, and recent regional crises gone global made this painfully clear. In addition to complementing fundamental investment analysis, Robeco’s Country Sustainability Rankings are also used to inform engagement activities with governments, policymakers, NGOs, academics and other institutional stakeholders as well as with companies operating in specific jurisdictions.
Since its first edition in 2012, Robeco’s CSR framework now covers 150 of the world’s most significant countries around the globe, including 23 developed and 127 emerging market and developing economies, all of which are included in the SI Open Access Initiative. Country scores are calculated, and rankings updated twice a year. Following each update, Robeco will publish the 20 top- and bottom-ranked countries on its website.
Carola van Lamoen, Head of Sustainable Investing: “The expansion of Robeco’s SI Open Access initiative with our Country Sustainable Rankings is an important next step in sharing our SI knowledge. Not only are we helping our clients make better informed sustainable Investing decisions, but by opening up our CSR to a broader audience, including academics, we also aim to develop new insights and contribute to improving quality and standards setting across the industry. We believe a better understanding of how a nation is managing its environmental resources, its social capital and its governing structures contains significant value that extends far beyond financial capital statistics. We look forward to also making other SI IP available to stakeholders in the future”.
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