Shared Metrics of Sustainability: a Knowledge Graph Approach

Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) criteria allow to evaluate business’s overall awareness and attention to social and environmental aspects. They are fundamental tools to direct investments towards sustainable projects and activities. However, each ESG rating agency has its own definitions, criteria and methodologies for the selection of the sustainable business portfolio, each not directly comparable with the other, which includes a set of indicators capable to measure sustainability. A shared understanding of what “sustainability” means is compelling. As a contribution in this direction, in the present paper we report ongoing work on the definition of a Knowledge Graph of some of the ESG indicators existing in the Literature. Links in the Knowledge Graph express semantically rich information including mathematical relations among indicators. We discuss the advantages for sharing, communication and comparison of this approach as well as open research issues