For the third consecutive year, Barron’s asked Calvert to identify companies showing leadership in addressing the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risks relevant to their operations.

The resulting list of “The 100 Most Sustainable Companies” is available on the Barron’s website, but here’s some information about how we created it.

To begin, Calvert analyzed the 1,000 largest publicly held companies incorporated and headquartered in the United States, measured by market capitalization. We rated each on its demonstrated responsibility in five key stakeholder categories:

Shareholders (e.g., board structure, business ethics, executive compensation)
Employees (e.g., workplace diversity, labor relations, workplace safety)
Customers (e.g., data security, product safety, product quality)
Community (e.g., human rights along the supply chain, Indigenous Peoples rights, animal welfare )
Planet (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions, water use/stress, energy use and efficiency)
In doing so, Calvert considered more than 230 key performance indicators (KPIs), organized into 28 distinct topics. Each company was rated between 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 when that data was available. More details about the methodology are available on Barron’s website.

Once we had the ratings for each of the five stakeholder categories, we calculated each company’s overall rating based on our assessment of the financial materiality that each category represented within the company’s industry peer group. In addition, we did not consider any company that ranked in the bottom quartile of any of its financially material stakeholder category.

via Impact Blog | How Calvert’s research produced Barron’s 100 Most Sustainable Companies list | Calvert