Every year RobecoSAM invites the 2,500 largest companies in terms of free float market capitalization from all industries to participate in its annual Corporate Sustainability Assessment (CSA). In addition, 800 companies from the emerging markets are invited to participate and gain eligibility for inclusion in the recently launched DJSI Emerging Markets. The CSA is the research backbone for the constructions of all the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes (DJSI). After the assessment, companies are included in the DJSI World if their sustainability performance ranks among the top 10% of their industry peers.
800 companies from the emerging markets are invited to participate and gain eligibility for inclusion in the recently launched DJSI Emerging Markets
The CSA focuses on a company’s long-term value creation with over 100 questions on financially material, economic, environmental, social and corporate governance practices. Over half of the questions are industry-specific as RobecoSAM is convinced that industry-specific sustainability risks and opportunities play a key role in a firm’s long term success. The other half includes questions on general sustainability issues such as corporate governance, product stewardship and talent attraction and retention.
The assessment process has continuously been refined over the years. This year, RobecoSAM has aligned several of its Climate Strategy questions with corresponding questions asked by CDP, the provider of Climate Disclosure abd Climate Performance Leadership Indexes. This will reduce the workload for 90% of DJSI participating companies which also respond to the request for climate change information through CDP.
Further, the 2013 CSA and DJSI family will be aligned with the Global Industry Classification System (GICS), thus meeting commonly accepted sector classification standards. The switch to GICS, which is a widely used standard in the financial industry, will therefore allow the DJSI to become more attractive for investors as it meets the need for one complete and consistent set of global sector and industry definitions. The changes will be implemented into all the indices. This means that the former 19 ICB super sectors will be replaced with 24 GICS industry groups, and the 58 RobecoSAM sectors will be replaced by 59 RobecoSAM industries.