Come si migliora il rating ESG?
What does the ESG rating measure?
The ESG rating is the assessment of an organization's performance with respect to environmental, social and governance issues.
If this is the first time you have heard of ESG, or you are still unclear about what it means, we recommend that you first read our article on the ESG goals, where you will find a more general overview of the topic, or download our free complete guide on ESG indicators.
Instead, in this content we want to take it a step further by explaining how to improve your ESG rating. But first let's try to answer another fundamental question: why improve your ESG rating?
The benefits of a high ESG rating
Today, having a high ESG score not only offers several benefits to companies, but can even make a difference in terms of market positioning, allowing you to differentiate yourself from competitors.
Here are some benefits associated with a high ESG score:
- attract and retain investments more easily, as ESG issues have become a benchmark for figuring out which companies to direct funding toward;
- Get better financial performance through cost efficiency in the company;
- reduce legal and regulatory risks, while also avoiding heavy penalties due to government restrictions on companies' environmental impact;
- meet the expectations of consumers and staff, who increasingly value environmental and social issues.
The 3 steps to improve your ESG rating
1. Understand your company's impact on climate change
The first step is definitely to figure out how much your company actually impacts the environment. How is this done? By calculating emissions, starting with direct emissions, that is, those related to the company's activities, and then indirect emissions, resulting from the energy purchased and consumed.
Next, it will be possible to calculate emissions related to activities not directly controlled by the company, such as those of suppliers and customers: so-called scope 3 emissions.
2. Mitigating environmental impact
Now that you know how many emissions your company produces, you need to figure out what you can do to lessen this impact by designing an emissions reduction strategy based on your business activities to make your work environment more efficient.
However, a point needs to be made: putting in place actions and steps to reduce your emissions, such as switching to renewable energy sources, can take time and, more importantly, will not get you to zero your impact.
For this reason, it is critical to offset non-reducible emissions by supporting certified environmental projects, so that you balance your impact on the environment while continuing to reduce it as much as possible.
3. Promoting sustainable practices
One effective way to reduce the impact of corporate activities is to promote sustainable practices within the company: for example, you could train and raise awareness among staff on environmental sustainability, or promote sustainable actions such as recycling collection.
Or, again, you could consider promoting smart working or working in hybrid mode: think that working from home for half the week decreases the emissions produced by as much as 24 percent.
In short, analyzing, planning, and improving are the actions behind all good ESG rating initiatives. But that's not all: in this article we've seen where to start to improve your score, but there are other moves in sustainability that you can put in place to get a higher ESG rating.
The Up2You Insight team has put together an infographic with the 5 moves in sustainability to improve your ESG rating, in which you will find more insights, data, and charts that will help you improve your score by a lot.
Fill out the form below and download it for free!
