At the time of publication, the (ongoing) crawler has searched for sustainability reports published by approximately 15,000 publicly listed companies across all sectors and geographies and will continue until it covers the largest 50,000 public companies. A similar process is ongoing to identify all available reports and initiatives from privately held companies. The precision in the identification of initiatives is about 98%, assessed through several manual controls in random samples. The accuracy in categorising SDGs and types of action is above 90% on average.

To the best of our knowledge, this dataset represents the only global coverage of corporate sustainability initiatives available today. Moreover, the fact that such initiatives are categorised by their objective (SDG) and their behavioural components adds to its distinctiveness.

By collecting information at the granular level of individual actions, we identify data that can be leveraged not only to assess companies’ sustainability strategies, but also to analyse the evolution of corporate behaviour in specific sectors and geographies, aimed at contributing to the achievement of SDGs, thereby helping to inform policy development and investor strategies.
Like any dataset, this also has limitations to be considered; the most salient is the absence of assessment of some important characteristics of the initiative, beyond its objectives, its behavioural content and the type of stakeholders that will benefit from it. Information related to the initiative’s scope, its cost, and its impact are unfortunately rarely disclosed in sustainability reports and will require different data collection methodologies to assess them. The major advantage of the methodology adopted, in addition to its global coverage, is the absence of subjectivity in the identification and categorisation of the sustainability initiatives, a well-known limitation in existing ESG metrics.