Covering over 12,000 companies globally, the CSA is an annual evaluation of a company’s sustainability practices. It enables you to benchmark your company’s performance on a wide range of industry-specific economic, environmental, and social criteria that are relevant to the growing number of sustainability-focused investors and are expected to be financially relevant to your corporate success.
Leverage the unique expertise and the proprietary methodology underlying the Dow Jones Best-in-Class Indices as well as S&P Scored & Screened Indices (renaming effective February 10, 2025).
In 2024, over 3,500 companies actively participated in the CSA. The CSA compares companies across 62 industries via industry-specific questionnaires that assess, on average, 23 sustainability topics in 110 questions. Based on their performance, companies receive scores ranging from 0 to 100 and percentile rankings for financially relevant sustainability criteria.
Participating companies represent nearly half of global market capitalization (relative to the S&P Global Broad Market Index). Participants also represent 44% of the companies in the S&P Global LargeMid Cap Index, 55% of companies in the S&P 500 Index, and 58% of companies in the S&P Global 1200 Index. Over the past 25 years, as the CSA has grown into a leading corporate sustainability database, it has also attracted the interest of capital market stakeholders. Hundreds of clients from more than 12 industries and over 50 countries directly subscribe to ESG Scores and ESG Raw Data as a key output of the CSA. This group includes financial institutions managing $35 trillion in assets who can utilize these scores and data to benchmark corporate performance, manage investment portfolios, allocate financial capital, and build engagement strategies. Additionally, ESG Scores and ESG Raw Data are integral to the sustainability and climate indices produced by S&P Dow Jones Indices, such as the S&P 500 Scored & Screened Index, further extending their reach to even more clients and market segments.
To ensure the quality and objectivity of the CSA, S&P Global voluntarily appoints an independent third party, Deloitte, to conduct an external audit of the assessment process each year.
As sustainability considerations become more critical to capital markets, the CSA enables us to provide you and your stakeholders with a relevant and comprehensive sustainability assessment. Participating companies cite these top three motivations to engage: increasing visibility with sustainability-focused investors, learning from CSA results, and enhancing reputation with internal and external stakeholders.
What started out as a paper-based questionnaire in 1999 has now grown into one of the world’s most extensive corporate sustainability tools and has become the basis for numerous ESG Indices. To ensure that our analysis remains focused on financially material criteria, we continuously refine our methodology to reflect new sustainability trends that are likely to have an impact on companies’ competitive landscape.
