**Context:**

During the COP26 U.N. climate conference, institutional investors pledged USD130 trillion to put combating climate change at the heart of their work. Furthermore, U.N. climate envoy Mark Carney put the figure at $100 trillion over the next three decades, and said the finance industry must find ways to raise private money to take the effort far beyond what states alone can do. These reflect a challenge often mentioned by investors who need to be certain that climate-related risks are being accounted for in a transparent and standardised way globally.

**Challenges:**

Asset management companies and institutional investors in sustainability responsible investing must gather climate and environmental data to understand companies' climate-related risks and generate informed investment decisions. Assessing companies' climate-related risks, however, is challenging because ESG reports do not provide:

* credible and transparent data sources;
* up to date data sources and metrics;
* transparent methodology;
* consistent methodology focused on "double materiality": the double materiality approach brings into consideration the impacts of Environmental factors on the company as well as the impact of the company on its stakeholders.

**Solution:**

To solve these challenges, we propose a novel AI-based platform for enhanced environmental impact disclosure in the finance industry. Our solution is the first in the market to have a comprehensive offering that combines seamlessly:

* Transparent and unbiased data from publicly disclosed data sources;
* Focus on "double materiality" impact analytics; and
* Transparent metrics methodology using the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) materiality map and the sustainability reporting standards roadmap from the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG).

**Environmental benefits:**

According to the article "Carbon Emissions Reduction and Corporate Financial Performance", it has been "found that carbon emissions reduction increases the return on assets, the return on equity, and the return on sales". Given that our solution brings data transparency to investors, businesses will be incentivized to reduce their environmental impact efficiently.

**About Snowflow:**

The project will be led and managed by Snowflow AI. Snowflow AI was founded by innovators and problem-solvers who believe in democratizing the access to AI so that any subject matter expert in any organization can turn plain text-data into valuable insights. We leverage the latest cognitive technologies with a focus and expertise on deep machine learning and cutting-edge natural language processing, providing an end-to-end enterprise AI platform that empowers any non-coder to automate text-data extraction and classification.