Global ESG Monitor Releases 2022 Report & Scorings

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in ESG Reporting

Global ESG Monitor Releases 2022 Report & Scorings

FRANKFURT, GERMANY / ACCESSWIRE / November 30, 2022 / In a new report released today, the Global ESG Monitor (GEM) shines a light on the Environmental, Social and Governance reporting of 350 important corporations worldwide. The GEM is the world leader in analyzing the transparency of ESG reporting and publishes a major report annually which analyzes non-financial ESG reporting across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia.

"2022 has been a year in which the importance of ESG issues has increased dramatically," said Michael Diegelmann, Co-Founder of the GEM. "Environmental and social crises fill the news daily and corporations need to clearly communicate what they are doing and how they govern their efforts. Progress is being made, but the bottom line is that many large multi-national companies fall short in their ESG reporting which will not go unnoticed by investors and the public."

In the GEM 2022, 625 ESG reports from 350 companies included in indices from ten major stock markets were analyzed. Comprehensive regional reports will be published subsequently over the coming weeks. Today the GEM global report is being published, covering the four most relevant continental stock market indices from Europe, the USA, Asia, and Australia ^[1] .

Few corporations approached the top of the scoring scale of 100 as defined by the GEM Assay™, the Global ESG Monitor‘s proprietary analytical model. The world's highest score for transparency in non-financial reporting was 90, and the lowest was seven. The GEM Assay™ analyzes the ESG reporting of companies on 184 criteria as disclosed in their published ESG reports. Corporate ESG reports are used in a variety of ways, including as a factor in third-party ESG scores used by investors to guide financial decisions.

When comparing the transparency of ESG reporting across continents, the average corporate score was 66 out of 100 in Europe, followed by 56 for Asia and 53 for both the United States and Australia.

"It is no surprise that the GEM found such a wide difference in reporting transparency in different nations and regions. There is still no uniform, internationally recognized standard in ESG reporting and this poses challenges for companies," said Ariane Hofstetter, the GEM's Co-Founder and Head of Research and Data Science. "Even though there is the widespread use of important analysis tools such as materiality assessments, there is still a lot of make believe and lack of validity and liability in the results."