Imagine you’re a business owner wanting to know how your company impacts the environment and what you can do to improve. Data plays a crucial role in this, but getting the right information, especially detailed geographic data, is often challenging. This problem is especially important in areas like Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting, where understanding the specific environmental impacts of your actions can be tough. That’s where Geospatial ESG comes in, a new approach designed to give clearer insights into ESG factors.
So, what is Geospatial ESG, and why should you care?
The diagram emphasises that these three areas (Environmental, Social, and Governance) are interconnected and form the ESG criteria. Companies aiming to meet ESG standards must address these aspects to be considered socially responsible and attract investors who prioritise ethical considerations alongside financial returns.
What and who?
Geospatial ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) integrates geospatial data and technologies into ESG frameworks and practices. It aims to enhance the understanding and management of environmental and social impacts and governance practices through spatially explicit information.
The World Wildlife Fund-Sight (WWF-Sight) team started developing geospatial methods in 2015 to understand better where, what, and who is of harm to the natural world. These methods help gain greater insight into the environmental impact of assets, companies, and sovereign states. The goal is to enhance the capacity of financial stakeholders to distinguish based on environmental performance, thereby facilitating a shift towards genuinely sustainable development.
To make the concept of Geospatial ESG more relatable, consider how it can be applied in real-life scenarios. For example, if you’re a coffee producer, Geospatial ESG can help you see how your farming practices affect local forests and water sources. By using maps and satellite data, you can identify areas where changes in your operations could reduce environmental harm and improve sustainability. This level of detail helps not only in understanding your current impact but also in planning more eco-friendly strategies for the future.
White paper on GeoESG
The white paper “Geospatial ESG,” released in 2022, tackles the emerging application of geospatial data to gain environmental insights on the asset, corporate, and sovereign levels.
This document explains how Geospatial ESG aligns with existing environmental biodiversity screening approaches. Those are mainly categorised into two approaches focusing on:
- indirect measures via modeling of financial data and sectoral classification
- direct geospatially derived measurements
The goal of both approaches, as stated in the published white paper, is to define at multiple scales the environmental impact (and often dependencies) of a wide selection of companies as comprehensively and accurately as possible.
One of the essential aspects of a geospatial ESG approach is asset data (related to the location of an asset or a company’s or suppliers’ geolocated assets) and observational data (datasets providing insights).
Last words
There is still more to the Geospatial ESG approach. Would you be interested in knowing more?
Featured image of the blog: https://www.wwf.org.uk/what-we-do/projects/nature-and-spatial-finance
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