Methodology

The Accountability Rating evaluates companies across four key areas, or ‘domains’. In each domain, we ask a range of questions about the company being assessed.

• Strategy: Does the company address important social, environmental and broader economic issues in its business strategy?
• Governance: Are senior executives and the board accountable to stakeholders when setting strategy and formulating policy on extra-financial issues? Are these issues translated into management systems, standard procedures, incentives and performance targets towards specified goals?
• Engagement: Does the company engage in dialogue with the people and groups who have an interest in its business or may be affected by it or have an effect on it? Does the company publicly report its social and environmental performance? And is its report subject to independent assurance?
• Impact: Is the company effectively avoiding negative impacts on the environment, society and the marketplace? And is it active with its stakeholders in collaborative initiatives to solve challenging social and environmental issues?

In the first three domains, companies are assessed through detailed analysis of the information they put into the public domain, including their printed and online annual and sustainability reports. A formal quality assurance process to crosscheck the scoring is carried out to ensure consistency of interpretation among the review team.

Companies’ scores in the impact domain are based in part on data on their involvement in significant environmental, social, or broader economic controversies. This data is provided by ASSET4, a Switzerland-based investment information provider that specialises in environmental, social and governance research. Scores in this domain also reflect companies’ progress in reducing their carbon intensity (derived from reporting to the Carbon Disclosure Project) and their involvement in multi-stakeholder initiatives such as the Equator Principles and US Climate Action Partnership.

We give companies a score in each domain. Each domain is equally weighted. A company’s overall score is out of a maximum of 100.