Corporate Sustainability & ESG Ratings Performance

For sustainability leaders and executives who want their ESG performance, and their ratings, to reflect real competitiveness

The Challenge

ESG ratings now shape access to capital, procurement decisions, and reputation, yet many companies find their scores stuck. The questionnaire gets answered every year, the report gets longer, and the ranking barely moves. Meanwhile competitors reach Industry Leader status and turn it into a commercial argument.

The usual cause is that the effort is aimed at the disclosure rather than the performance behind it. Assessments like the S&P Corporate Sustainability Assessment are designed to detect exactly this: they score management systems, quantitative results, and integration into the business, not the polish of the answers. A company cannot document its way to leadership.

What works is treating sustainability as a competitiveness discipline: pick the material issues, close the performance gaps that matter, and let the ratings register the change. That is the approach SolAbility has applied for over two decades, with results no other consultancy matches.

How SolAbility Solves It

Strategy First: The Framework Explained

Ratings performance follows strategy, not the other way around. Our corporate sustainability strategy framework explains the full approach: materiality, benchmarking, targets, operational integration, and measurement. It is the same five-step logic we apply in every engagement, published openly so you can judge the thinking before you hire it.

DJSI & S&P CSA Consulting

Our DJSI consulting service takes companies through the S&P Corporate Sustainability Assessment: gap analysis against CSA criteria, competitive benchmarking, improvement roadmaps, and submission support. We have guided three companies to DJSI World Industry Leader status and contributed to 118 Industry Leader awards over more than 20 years of CSA work.

ESG Strategy & Implementation

Beyond the assessment cycle, ESG implementation builds the substance the ratings reward: policies and procedures, management tools, KPI systems, and communication frameworks that embed sustainability in how the company actually operates. Performance improvement is what separates a one-time score bump from year-over-year leadership.

Company Media Sentiment Monitoring

The Global Sentiment Monitor tracks media sentiment for more than 20,000 companies worldwide, so you can see reputation trends and emerging ESG controversies for your company and its peers as they develop, not when the next annual assessment lands.

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DJSI World Industry Leaders architected
118
Industry Leader awards contributed to
20+
years of S&P CSA experience
FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

About corporate sustainability management and ESG ratings performance

Sustainably improving ESG ratings means improving the underlying performance the ratings measure, then documenting it in the language each assessment expects. The process starts with a gap analysis against the target assessment, prioritizes the criteria where the distance to industry best practice is smallest and the score impact largest, and then works through policies, management systems, KPIs, and disclosure. Chasing points without performance produces one good year; building performance produces leaders.
DJSI consulting supports companies through the S&P Corporate Sustainability Assessment (CSA), the questionnaire behind the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices. It typically covers gap analysis against CSA criteria, competitive benchmarking, a multi-year improvement roadmap, question-by-question response guidance, and evidence preparation. SolAbility has done this work for more than 20 years and has guided three companies to DJSI World Industry Leader status.
Reporting describes the past; strategy shapes the future. A corporate sustainability strategy defines which ESG issues are material to the business, sets measurable targets, and embeds them in operations and incentives. Reporting and ratings performance then follow as evidence of that strategy. Companies that start from the report rather than the strategy tend to plateau, because assessors increasingly score performance and integration rather than disclosure quality.
Yes. The Global Sentiment Monitor tracks media sentiment for more than 20,000 companies across 11,000+ credible sources in 110 languages. It surfaces emerging controversies, reputation trends, and peer comparisons in near real time, which complements annual ESG assessments with a continuous external view of how the company is actually being perceived.

Aim for Industry Leadership

Work with the consultancy behind three DJSI World Industry Leaders. Tell us where you stand today, and we will show you the path up.

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