Basics
Content Category: ESG
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Verisk Maplecroft is a global risk analytics company providing ESG, climate, political, and economic risk data for leading institutional investors and multinational corporations. They combine proprietary risk datasets with expert research on countries, industries, and commodities.
The Verisk Maplecroft dataset encompasses over 160 environmental or climate-related, human/labor rights- and development-related, political, and economic risk factors, in the form of standardized indices, for up to 198 countries globally. The portfolio of risk indices is built using proprietary methods from structured, unstructured, and geospatial datasets, drawing on more than 900 underlying indicators. These risk factors, which cover diverse issues ranging from air quality and climate change exposure, child labor and occupational health and safety, to corruption and civil unrest, are accessible through three categories of data packages: country risk, industry risk, and commodity risk.
These datasets provide critical context for investments in multiple asset classes. They help establish three things: which ESG issues are potentially material, whether they're being managed appropriately, and what questions to ask when engaging.
Data Overview
Asset Class: Country-, industry-, and commodity-level data relevant to sovereign debt, as well as equities and corporate debt, real assets, currencies, and sectoral and commodity risk analytics.
Data Frequency: Quarterly
Delivery Frequency: Weekly
History: Global risk data from 1995; Industry risk data from 2017; Commodity risk data from 2019
Data Methodology
Each Verisk Maplecroft issue is presented on a standardized zero-to-10 scale, allowing clients to easily compare multiple risk issues across locations and time on a consistent, easy-to-interpret basis.
The indicator data underlying Verisk Maplecroft risk indices come from a variety of structured and unstructured third-party and proprietary sources. Public sources include large international organizations such as the IMF, World Bank, UN, as well as geospatial data providers like NASA and NOAA. Unstructured sources are exploited using machine learning algorithms. Proprietary datasets are developed internally, relying on our team of regional and thematic experts. The validity and reliability of the sources are tested along with the frequency, timeliness, and coverage to ensure the data fits Verisk Maplecroft standards. For additional information on sourcing and vetting, see the Content Methodology Guide.
As noted in the top section, each one of Verisk Maplecroft’s 160+ risk indices falls into one of four broad themes: Environment and Climate Change, Human/Labour Rights and Development, Politics, and Economics. Each theme is further divided into sub-categories, such as dynamic versus structural political risks, natural hazards versus climate change risks, and labor rights versus civil or political rights. Verisk Maplecroft’s Analytics team maintains these datasets and is responsible for ensuring their integrity, quality, and timeliness.
The below sections provide additional details on the three packages of data:
Global Risk: With up to 198 countries covered, a given risk index will be provided for 150-190 countries on average, depending on the availability of the data and the necessity of ensuring complete country coverage for a given issue.
Industry Risk: 74 industries covered across 21 key risks, focusing on key country-level environmental, social, and governance risks that are adjusted to reflect the materiality of that risk issue for a given industry.
Commodity Risk: 160 hard and soft commodities covered across 20 key risks, capturing the material risk issues in the countries that represent the most global production of those commodities, and focusing on risks present at the level of the farm or mine.
Use Cases
Risk Analysis
- Country Risk
- Over 160 risk indices across 198 countries, organized by environmental and climate change-related, political, economic, and human/labor rights and development-related risk issues.
- Analyze the ESG and political risks relevant to a sovereign debt portfolio by matching the country-level data to all issuers worldwide.
- Match national and sub-national location based ESG, climate, political, and economic risk scores to companies in an equities or corporate debt portfolio to understand the background context driving positive or negative ESG impacts and their management by firms; as well as the vulnerability of a portfolio to disruption by political, economic, or physical risks. Pair Verisk Maplecroft data with FactSet’s Geographic Revenue dataset to perform this analysis at a national level.
- Understand and respond to the potentially material risk factors facing your business based on your corporate and supplier locations.
- Industry Risk
- Incorporate industry adjustments into equities and corporate debt analysis across the 74 industries and 21 key risks included in the dataset to gain deeper insights into the combined geographical and industry contexts shaping the ESG profile of your portfolio.
- Gain visibility into commodity-specific ESG risks, relevant for portfolios with direct exposure to a commodity or corporates with commodity-dependent value chains.
- Commodity Risk
- Data is provided on 160 hard and soft commodities across 20 key risks. For each commodity and risk, country-specific scores are available for key producers.
- Gain visibility into commodity-specific ESG risks to inform understanding of the ESG risk exposures of the companies in a portfolio with commodity-dependent value chains; of the ESG profiles of sovereigns; and of any direct commodity exposures.
The details provided above are as of February 2020.
If you have any questions or would like to learn more about any of the content mentioned above, please contact us at sales@factset.com.
Please visit the product page on the Open:FactSet Marketplace for more information: Verisk Maplecroft.
