The transparency of the CSA process and related feedback has been further increased. Participating companies can now view the assessed version of their original CSA submission. Questions that were subject to a change by the S&P Global ESG Research analysts are flagged and the changed data points are highlighted. This allows you to easily identify areas where our analysts made changes to your answers based on the CSA methodology.  

Follow these steps:

1. Go to the "Assessments" tab of the CSA Portal.
2. Navigate to the "Questionnaires" section.
3. Select the latest campaign available at the top right dropdown menu.
4. Identify questions with changed information. Criteria that contain changed questions and the changed questions are marked with a black flag. A flag means that at least one data point in a question was changed by our ESG Research analysts after your submission. 

A) Select the question of interest.

B) Select "S&P Global revised answer", if not selected already.

6. Identify changed data points. If a data point is highlighted in pink, it means that it has been changed by the ESG Research analysts when assessing your answer.

The data that you see in the field with pink shading is the most updated, which was considered for the purposes of the assessment.

There may be more than one pink shaded area within the question, indicating a change from one option to another by the analysts.

7. To view the change from your original submission, select "Company answer" (shown in the dropdown in step 5) to toggle to your original submission. This way you can check which data points were deleted or changed based on your supporting evidence or additional comments.

Will the assessed data points be used when I pre-fill my current questionnaire?

Yes. In order to facilitate your year-on-year improvement, by closing gaps against last year's assessment, you will be able to pre-fill the 2023 CSA with the assessed data points from the 2022 CSA. The pre-fill will be offered in a pop-up window automatically after you have begun participation in this year's CSA. Please visit the "Manage Participation" section of the "Assessments" tab to understand when the questionnaire for your company opens.

Can I get feedback on my assessed questionnaire?

If you would like more detailed feedback on the results of your company’s CSA, please consider our ESG Benchmarking services. For more information, please contact the ESG Benchmarking team via this form.

What are some of the reasons my company’s CSA Score(s) decreased this year? 

When looking at your 2023 CSA results, you may notice that your company’s scores have dropped in some criteria, the dimensions and maybe even at the total score level. As you interpret these results, remember that the CSA methodology is updated every year and may impact up to 10-15% of the questions within the questionnaire.

S&P Global updates the CSA annually for several reasons, including to: 

• Reflect emerging ESG trends. This allows you as a participant to start focusing on emerging issues early, which is a feature of the CSA that long-time participants value as one of the benefits of participation Typically, the weight of new criteria is low initially. The questions we ask are simple and only become more challenging over time..
  
  

• Align with increasing performance expectations. We may introduce a new criterion asking if you are aware of risks and opportunities in a particular emerging area or if certain internal policies exist. In future years, therefore, the performance expectations on such issues will likely increase. In addition to the key metrics you use to measure an issue – coupled with the link to your company’s business strategy – we may ask which KPIs and targets are used, whose remuneration is linked to those targets, what was the historical performance on the topic and what sort of targets has your company set for the future.
  
  

• Reflect greater demand for public disclosures. We might start to reward companies with points for public disclosures for some questions to reflect to increasing demand from stakeholders for the information. In a second step questions might be changed to require public disclosure to score any points. This is typically the case if the topics become a part of reporting standards or regulation or as the availability of public disclosure on the topic becomes widespread in a certain industry. 

• Remove questions that are no longer differentiating. Questions in which the majority of companies achieves top scores are no longer distinguishing may also be eliminated from the CSA. This does not suggest or imply that the topic is no longer an important sustainability issue, but rather that the share of companies that meet the CSA’s expectations for it is so large, that it is no longer considered differentiated. 

The table below illustrates how the different reasons impact the weight of questions or criteria in the aggregations of scores, as well as how scores and percentile rank are impacted. 

Annual changes to the CSA will impact all companies the same way. This means that your industry peers may also experience a drop in score. Therefore, it is always important to look at your relative performance by considering the year-on-year changes in your company’s percentile rank at the question or higher aggregation levels.