Today we are pleased to announce the launch of our Quantitative Ratings.

These ratings are purely based on quantitative aspects - at no point do they involve the personal interpretation of an analyst who must read through text or survey responses. We believe that numbers in large volumes speak for themselves and can serve as a foundation for a more qualitative analysis.

Carbon accounting and metrics are still in the early stages of development and we have chosen the Quartiles approach to set the right level of granularity for comparison. This approach splits the spectrum of performances into 4 ranges, each capturing 25% of the companies. The first quartile for example represents the range of the Top 25% performances.

Methodology

For each sector and for each metric within that sector, we compute the 3 thresholds that separate the different quartiles. Given that we cover 15 metrics for 100 sectors for the past 6 years, our algorithms calculate 3x15x100x6=27,000 Quartile values from our large database.
With those thresholds, we can assess where a company stands compared to its peers: for example, ACME's Scope 1 (direct combustion) Emissions per M$ Turnover in 2008 fall within the 2nd Quartile for all Scope 1 Emissions benchmarked on a M$ Turnover basis for its sector in 2008: 

Our ratings are based on 3 main criteria:

We use the following efficiency metrics in our computations:

• Direct and indirect emissions (GHG Scope 1 and 2) and total Ton CO2/Employee
• Direct and indirect emissions (GHG Scope 1 and 2) and total Ton CO2 / Million US$ turnover
• Total Ton CO2 / production metric specific of the sector (e.g. m2, litres, ton cement....)
• Purchased electricity in MWh / Employee
• Purchased electricity in MWh / Million US$ turnover

Using the MWh over Scope 2 emissions enables us to eliminate unfair advantages that some companies may have thanks to the abundant supply of nuclear energy for example. Indeed, the French can't always win.

At this stage, we apply an equal weight to these three criteria when computing the overall rating.
Note that on request, we can apply different weights and ratings to help you identify top performers that meet your criteria. We have solved the hard part (historical data of thousands of companies and automated algorithms).

Frequency

Given that new performance data is published throughout the year, our ratings also change throughout the year. As a start, we are taking a snapshot 4 times per year (mid-quarter).

Accessing the ratings

The ratings are available through our standard Business Intelligence tool online; this will enable you to slice and dice through the ratings exactly the same way as you would do for the carbon intensity factors (see screenshots below). We can also extract ratings on an ad-hoc basis from our system according to your criteria (country, company size, year, sector, list of specific companies, only top quartile performers etc...)

Screenshots

This screenshot shows the following for BMW in 2008:

• BMW scores 1st quartile for their disclosure level - because they provide details about direct and inderect emissions, energy consumption and waste.
• BMW scores 2.1 quartile for their carbon efficiencies: some metrics could be first quartiles (e.g. direct emissions), while other emissions are 2nd or 3rd quartile (e.g. MWh/employee) - and the average of their efficiency metrics is 2.1.
• BMW scores 2.5 quartile for their carbon efficiency reduction rate.
• Ovearll, coverted to a % score, BMW scores 68.9%. If it scored 1st quartile on each of the metrics, it would have scored 100%.