This project is concerned with the practice of sustainability reporting.
Developed by Michael Hockenhull, for Carlsbergfondet. Contact at michh @ itu.dk for more information.
Thanks go to Steffen Dalsgaard, Kristian Cedervall Lauta, Pedro Ferreira, David Thomsen, Luis Alfredo Landa Mariaca and Mace Ojala for help along the way. The bad stuff is all my fault, and most of the good is theirs.
This project is concerned with the practice of sustainability reporting.
The ESG-database is an open-source project. It was developed for a Unix environment, using the Django framework as well as both PostgreSQL and MongoDB databases. The source code is available via GitHub here.
The project is inspired by the Digital Methods research tradition, in which the internet is considered a medium that can be repurposed in the service of research. In particular, certain projects are of particular relevance.
In technical terms, the project is simple, yet has required a number of special techniques. Sustainability reporting in some form is required by Danish law of organizations of a certain size. For this reason the ESG-databases chosen approach to gathering and displaying data is to take it's point of departure in the authoritative source on Danish organizations; the Danish Business Authority (DBA).
However, the DBA does not maintain a list of companies required to do sustainability reporting, nor does it have a list of sustainability reports themselves. Instead, given its current status as non-financial reporting companies are allowed to submit their reporting in any format.
This means that the ESG-database must accomplish two things:
Ultimately these tasks are complicated by the relative unstructured nature of sustainability reporting. Some companies do sustainability reporting through distinct reports, others integrate it into their annual reports, and others use even more documents such as 'fact sheets'. Still the typical main approaches are either the integrated or distinct report. Irrespective of their particular formats, most sustainability reporting takes the form of natural language prose as well as certain tables of data.
The ESG-database accomplishes the two aforementioned tasks by ... Assessing whether or not organizations are required to do sustainability reporting. This task can be achieved based on the existing public data, although it isn't straightforward.