UK drinks giant Diageo, US software services firm salesforce.com, and engineering services player Schlumberger were among the largest additions to the world group of this year’s Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI).
The latest annual shake-up of the DJSI, which was announced last week, saw the biggest additions dominated by US companies such as General Mills, Sempra Energy, and Waste Management Inc., although Japan’s Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp and Italian insurance firm Assicurazioni Generali also joined the fray. However, Samsung, Bayer, Barclays, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Spain’s Telefonika, and Japan’s Hitachi were among the 10 biggest deletions from the sustainability indices, which represent the “gold standard” for corporate sustainability, according to RobecoSAM, the investment analyst responsible for carrying out the assessment.
Launched in 1999, the DJSI World listings track the globe’s biggest companies based on analyst RobecoSAM’s analysis of financially-driven material environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in accordance with ratings agency S&P’s methodology. RobecoSAM assess companies using its Corporate Sustainability Assessment to draw up a score which determines whether a company is included in the top group of companies, or whether it should drop off the list.
The assessment methodology is updated every year to continually raise the bar for sustainability performance, the analyst said. The indices also include sector-specific DJSI rankings. The component lists for each sector are set to be published on 24th September. RobecoSAM also announced that the number of companies seeking to have their sustainability efforts measured and assessed in this way continued to rise this year, ticking up a further five per cent.
Source BusinessGreen