How ESG Commitments work

The user passes a company identifier as input and receives a list of classified ESG commitments as output.

Each commitment is an individual statement attributed to the company, returned with the page it was found on, the statement text as published, and a classification against the Veridion ESG taxonomy.

The module supports sustainability due diligence and supplier onboarding, verifying stated ESG programmes across a portfolio or supply chain, assessing the maturity and transparency of a company's ESG programme, and sustainability reporting and scorecards.

Self declared, by definition

Commitments are taken exclusively from a company's own web presence. That includes its primary website, any dedicated sustainability domain it operates, and the sustainability, governance, and corporate responsibility sections and reports published on those domains.

This is what makes every commitment genuinely self declared: what you receive is what the company says about itself, in its own words, on digital property it controls.

Coverage is multi-language, so commitments are found and classified wherever a company publishes, and coverage does not thin out for companies that publish outside English.

Which statements qualify

Not every sentence on a sustainability page is a commitment. What you receive are statements carrying a clear ESG context that map to a recognised risk criterion, so the narrative and background material surrounding them on the same page do not appear.

How each commitment is classified

Every commitment is tagged against the shared ESG risk taxonomy: a pillar, a theme within that pillar, and one of the 26 risk criteria.

One statement can map to several risk criteria

A single statement can be relevant to more than one risk criterion. Where that happens, the API returns one row per commitment and risk criterion pair. Each row carries the same source page and the same statement text, classified under a different theme and risk criterion.

This is intended. It means that filtering by a specific risk criterion returns every commitment relevant to it, rather than only those whose primary classification happens to match.

Example. The following appears on a company's sustainability page:

"To maximise the efficient use of wood, we use the unused material, such as bark, forest remnants or stumps, to generate bioenergy..."

That single statement is relevant to three risk criteria, and produces three rows:

Duplicate commitments

Companies repeat themselves, and the same pledge often appears on a landing page, in a report, and in a press release across a single site. Commitments are deduplicated semantically, on content, so each unique commitment is delivered once, attributed to the most ESG relevant page on which it appears.

Keeping commitments current

Commitments describe the current state of a company's web presence rather than dated events, and this shapes how the module behaves.

Where the API already has commitments on record for a company, those commitments are returned immediately. Otherwise processing is triggered and the content is collected, capturing what is new, what has changed, and what has been removed. That decision sits with Veridion rather than with the caller. Read more about processing patterns.