Barron’s 100 Most Sustainable Companies: The Methodology

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Calvert Research & Management, a top sustainable investing shop, analyzed the 1,000 largest U.S. publicly held companies, measured by market capitalization. It rated each company on five key stakeholder categories: shareholders, employees, customers, community, and planet.

To calculate the ratings, Calvert considered more than 230 key performance indicators from six primary vendors—CDP (formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project), ISS, MSCI, Sustainalytics, Refinitiv’s Asset4, and TruValue Labs—and supplemented by other data sources, where relevant.

This data was organized into 28 distinct topics, such as greenhouse gas emissions, workplace safety, and workplace diversity. (See details in the table below). These 28 distinct topics were sorted into the five key stakeholder categories. Each company received a rating of 0-100 in each stakeholder category, based on Calvert’s proprietary analysis and scoring methodology, which included taking an average of indicator-level scores over two years.

Next, an overall rating for each company was calculated using a weighted average of the five key stakeholder categories. The weightings were based on Calvert’s assessment of the financial materiality of each stakeholder category within each company’s industry peer group. Calvert determined a unique weight for each category in each of more than 200 distinct industry peer groups.

In addition, to be considered among the 100 Most Sustainable Companies, a firm needed to be rated above the bottom quartile in all financially material stakeholder categories. In other words, a company’s poor performance with any key stakeholder group determined to be financially material disqualified that company from consideration.