Article on ESG Investor: Driving Impact Through SDG Alignment

The article of ESG Investor on 'Driving Impact Through SDG Alignment' also highlighs that some asset owners are taking a collaborative approach to addressing the data gap and quotes PGGM's Piet Klop.

Cooperative Netherlands-based pension scheme PGGM (€268 billion AUM) has collaborated with APG, AustralianSuper and the British Columbia Investment Management Corporation to build the Sustainable Development Investments (SDI) Asset Owner Platform. Over 8,000 companies have been analysed by SDI on their existing contributions to the SDGs, and the platform has 17 asset owner members.

“We wanted to establish a standard led by asset owners that indicates alignment with the SDGs in a way that’s credible, transparent and carries weight in the market – so we built a taxonomy of investable solutions [using machine-learning technologies], mapping out to what extent revenues generated by companies [through products and services] align with SDGs,” says Piet Klop, PGGM’s Senior Advisor for Responsible Investment.

The benefit of machine-learning is that “it will get better over time” and improve the accuracy of the SDI platform, he points out.

To ensure the reliability of the data, Entis, a data and software technology firm that is a partner behind the platform, combines the AI and machine-learning used to harvest the structured and unstructured data from corporates with “human validation”.

 

Read the whole article here.