Locating the Future of ESG: The Promise of Geospatial Data in Advancing ESG Research

Abstract

This viewpoint surveys the environmental, social, governance (ESG) approach to sustainability at a time where it is simultaneously oversold and underestimated. We emphasize that ESG is not the same as sustainability. ESG can describe risks, opportunities, or simply preferences, and historically the process of turning soft information into hard data takes time. We suggest the frontier of ESG is location- based data, which can address some of the many shortcomings of firm-level ESG scores.

Keywords: ESG, sustainability, geospatial, greenwashing, accounting