About the data
When gathering the environmental incident reports that corporations are involved in, MANA’s algorithm captures each individual report of an incident. As one incident may be reported on more than once, the number of incident report is not necessarily a good measure of how frequent companies are involved in such incidents. MANA therefore combines all reports of one incidents into one specific MANA alert.
Assessing the total number of MANA alerts for a given company thus tells us how many environmental incidents the company has been involved in. The higher the number of incidents the more risk its operations pose for the environment and local communities surrounding their operations, which will likely pose a financial risk to the companies’ (potential) investors.
Methodology
MANA relies on its network of local and international organisations to report environmental incidents on the Internet and through online media channels like Twitter. Using their sophisticated algorithm, MANA extracts the following information from the identified sources:
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Incident location;
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Company concerned;
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Source which made the incident known or identified it as accurate;
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Environmental categorization (forest, deforestation, water, pollution… etc.);
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Evidence (pictures, documents, testimonies of local communities …etc.);
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Response of the company involved in the incident; and
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Degree of public attention generated.
Lastly this data is then aggregated and organized in a suitable format for financiers to analyze it in their risk matrix.