Russia will create a national “ESG Ecosystem Atlas”

This service will systematize information about the resources and infrastructure present in Russia to ensure the sustainable development of enterprises and organizations.

A unified platform for the national ESG infrastructure will appear in Russia — the “ESG Ecosystem Atlas”. It is designed to analyze and summarize data on the opportunities available in the state for the implementation of ESG principles.

The abbreviation ESG stands for Environmental, Social Development and Corporate Governance. ESG is an organization’s performance standards that are used to evaluate investments in an enterprise.

Environmental criteria determine how a company takes care of nature. Social Criteria examines how it manages relationships with employees, suppliers, customers, and society. Corporate governance concerns company management, executive compensation, auditing, internal controls, and shareholder rights.

ESG criteria appeared as a response to environmental degradation, global warming, and growing economic inequality between rich and poor countries, which created additional ground for the emergence and development of new financial instruments.

The project to create a service will launch an ESG alliance. As reported on the website of the association, the first section of the Atlas will be devoted to reporting in the field of sustainable development. It and three more sections are planned to be launched before the end of 2022, the rest will be put into operation in 2023.

The alliance will collect data for the service using crowdsourcing. Any interested organization will be able to join the service through the self-application procedure. Applicants will have to fill out a questionnaire on the official website of the ESG Alliance.

First of all, data on reporting companies, independent auditors, consultants, public assurance organizations, non-financial reporting data aggregators, and so on will appear on the platform.

Then the sections “Financial Sector”, “Evaluation”, “Innovations”, “General Infrastructure” and others will appear in the Atlas.

The alliance clarified that representatives of the expert community will moderate and verify applications. Among them are representatives of rating agencies, consulting companies, business, the academic community and regulators.

ESG-atlas enlisted the support of such organizations as “WWF Russia”, the Infragreen intersectoral expert and analytical platform, the Analytical Credit Rating Agency (ACRA), “Rosatom” State Corporation, “Skolkovo” Moscow School of Management, the Russian State Development Corporation VEB.RF and others.

Cover photo: frame from the film “The Intern”