Sustainability Intelligence

This project involves the development of a sustainability intelligence system aimed at tracking and analysing Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) efforts as organizations move toward achieving UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

How companies deal with sustainability issues will affect how they address business opportunities and achieve overall sustainability success. One key element to the overall sustainability performance is the design and implementation of ESG initiatives.

S2, a data-driven system anchored on analysing multi-framework ESG disclosures, was developed by the Director of UNSW Digital Sustainability Knowledge Hub, Professor Shan Pan and his team. Powered by AI-based algorithms, the system equips organizations with strategy visualization capabilities to track sustainability efforts, design sustainability initiatives and optimize investments. The system was also designed to be integrated into the existing digital ecosystem, which would bring sustainability initiatives to the forefront of digital innovation and organizational transformation.

The system was developed in response to the significant growth in organizations’ ESG commitments in recent years. To contribute to achieving SDGs, organizations will need access to advanced data analytics to manage the vast amounts of sustainability initiative-related data, utilize strategy visualization techniques and develop easy-to-access dashboards for strategy making and benchmarking purposes.

The new solution aims to make sustainable-focused innovation identifiable, searchable, and trackable by connecting community initiatives to the SDGs, providing insight into sustainable innovation on a global basis, and allowing users to analyze innovation strength across distinct fields of sustainability.