COMPANY BACKGROUND
- Who is S&P Dow Jones Indices? S&P Dow Jones Indices (S&P DJI) is home to iconic financial market indicators, such as the S&P 500® and the Dow Jones Industrial Average®. The largest global resource for essential index-based market concepts, data, and research, it is a major investor resource to measure and trade the markets.
ESG at S&P DJI
S&P Dow Jones Indices has been a pioneer in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) indexing for 20 years, starting with the 1999 launch of the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index. Today, we offer an extensive range of indices to fit varying risk/return and ESG expectations, from core ESG and low-carbon climate approaches, to thematic and fixed income ESG strategies.
- Where does S&P DJI get its ESG data? S&P Global provides the data that powers the globally recognized Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI), S&P 500 ESG Index, and others in the S&P ESG Index Series. Each year, S&P Global conducts the Corporate Sustainability Assessment (CSA), an ESG analysis of over 11,000 companies. The CSA has produced one of the world’s most comprehensive databases of financially material sustainability information and serves as the basis for the scores that govern S&P DJI’s ESG indices.
S&P DJI ESG INDICES:
- What is the S&P ESG Index Series? The S&P ESG Index Series is a set of market-capitalization-weighted indices, targeting securities that meet industry-specific sustainability criteria. The indices maintain similar overall industry group weights as their underlying indices. ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance.
- Why was the S&P ESG Index Series created? The S&P ESG Index Series was launched to provide ESG-oriented and investable alternatives to leading market benchmarks, such as the S&P 500.
- What are the S&P DJI ESG Scores? S&P DJI ESG Scores are environmental, social, and governance scores that robustly measure ESG risk and performance factors for corporations, with a focus on financial materiality. The S&P DJI ESG Scores are used in the constituent selection process in the S&P ESG Index Series. They are a second set of ESG scores calculated by S&P Global ESG Research, in addition to the S&P Global ESG Scores that are used to define the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices constituents.
The S&P DJI ESG Scores are the result of further scoring methodology refinements to the S&P Global ESG Scores that result from S&P Global’s annual Corporate Sustainability Assessment (CSA), a bottom-up research process that aggregates underlying company ESG data to score levels. The scores contain a total company-level ESG score for a financial year, comprising individual environmental (E), social (S), and governance (G) dimension scores, beneath which there are on average over 20 industry-specific criteria scores that can be used as specific ESG signals (see Exhibit 1).
A company’s total ESG score is the weighted average of all criteria scores and their respective weights. Each individual ESG dimension score (e.g., a company’s “E” score) is the weighted average of all criteria scores and weights within a specific ESG dimension. Total ESG scores range from 0-100, with 100 representing best performance.
For more information on the S&P DJI ESG Scores, please see the S&P DJI ESG Scores Frequently Asked Questions.
