In this high-impact 2-month challenge the Omdena team developed a sustainability benchmarking system using natural language processing methodologies and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) related company reports. The results of this project will be used to benchmark companies in their industry and globally.

The project partner, SustainLab, is a Stockholm-based SaaS Sustainability Management platform that automates collection, processing and visualization of sustainability data, to help companies spend less time on data-handling and more on accelerating change.

The problem

An ESG report or Sustainability report is a report published by a company or organization about environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impacts. It enables the company to be more transparent about the risks and opportunities it faces. It is a communication tool that plays an important role in convincing skeptical observers that the company’s actions are sincere.

SustainLab is building an ecosystem of software and AI solutions to help companies become more sustainable. A sustainability benchmarking system, which shows companies a comparison against competitors is a compelling incentive to set more ambitious goals and take bolder steps towards those goals. As companies are the main contributor to our unsustainable environment, society, and finance, helping them to become more sustainable has a significant impact on our planet and our society.

The project outcomes

SustainLab has collected more than 500 sustainability reports with metadata (country, industry group, industry, year, etc.). Their objective is to increase the number of reports to 40000 by covering more companies, industries, and years and by automating the data collection process. To achieve this goal, the Omdena team extracted around 10,735 reports from several websites and developed a dashboard to visualize the sustainability work of a company. The dashboard helps to compare topics, focus areas, and activities amongst companies globally regarding their ESG and sustainability-related impact.

The team of more than 25 collaborators joined hands to build an end-end solution in accelerating the time-to-market scope for SustainLab.