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The Upright Project

https://www.uprightproject.com/

With the ongoing environmental crisis investors are trying to align their profits with their impact targets, while companies face growing demands from clients, investors, employees, and regulators to address their impact. However, 42% of companies still exaggerate their sustainability claims, and common methods to assess the impact of companies, such as ESG, only focus on a company’s financial risks associated with environmental or social issues, not on what they contribute to a society`s wellbeing.
The Upright Project (UP) offers the world’s first open-access platform for impact data which enables smarter decision-making for investors and companies by measuring the sum of a company’s positive and negative impacts on the environment, health, society, and knowledge.
Upright’s AI-based impact data engine is the first to contextualize the disclosures and sustainability targets of companies with estimates of the EU taxonomy alignment, UN Sustainable Development Goals, and Upright’s proprietary net impact quantifications. The data used is gathered from the world’s largest open-access scientific database (200m+ scientific articles), company disclosures, market research reports, Eurostat, OECD, and other databases.
The business model is based on selling licenses for more in-depth results to decision-makers through measuring progress, setting objectives, and communicating results, thereby offering a holistic end-to-end approach. Customers and partners already include investors such as the financial services corporation Nasdaq.
The world’s first open-access impact data platform
Driving transparency lies at the core of Upright’s innovation – it’s even in their name. While there are several providers for ESG reporting or carbon accounting, Upright is the first open-access platform to compare companies across industries not only based on their financial results but also their overall net impact. UP clusters the results into four categories: Society, Knowledge, Health and Environment. At Planet A we believe that democratizing impact data is key to driving change – and why we believe in the teams’ mission and UP’s potential, systemic impact. Last year their first product release already included publicly available net impact data for 700 companies, including the 500 largest companies globally.
Leaving ESG behind
ESG is increasingly being recognized for what it is: it reflects risks to companies and shareholders, but not necessarily to people and the planet. Upright eliminates exactly this bottleneck: the model’s top-down approach significantly improves the depth of most Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) measurements, such as ESG, SFDR, and others, that are currently biased by companies’ self-reporting and spending power.
UP’s mission is to incentivize companies to optimize their net impacts. Since companies are the major source of emissions (>70% of the world’s GHG emissions since 1988 are from only 100 companies) such a move has far-reaching implications. Enabling powerful stakeholders, from boards of directors, and investors to talent and consumers, to understand the net impact of companies and make informed decisions on which companies to support will lead to a step-change in companies’ actions and a wider systemic change in how we perceive companies` net value to society.
See White Paper here