Why is UDA crucial for ESG? How can MSP enhance the transparency and trust in ESG?
Dr. (Cdr.) Arnab Das
Founder and Director, MRC, Pune
Key Highlights
- ESG is a framework for evaluating environmental, social, and corporate governance aspects of organisations, originating from the UN’s “Who Cares Wins” initiative in 2004 and growing to a $30 trillion phenomenon by 2021.
- Criticism of ESG includes issues like data quality, lack of transparency, and greenwashing, which can lead to a trust deficit and low compliance.
- Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) is a process for allocating marine activities to achieve ecological, economic, and social objectives. It was initially focused on sustainability and climate change risk management.
- Underwater Domain Awareness (UDA) is crucial for ESG due to significant challenges and opportunities below the water’s surface. It requires tools suited for tropical conditions rather than outdated Western-designed sensors.
- A proposed MSP-based approach using Modelling & Simulations (M&S) with Digital Signal Processing (DSP) algorithms can build accurate underwater scenarios, enhancing transparency and trust in ESG.
- The MSP maps can support various applications, including strategic security, and can be categorised into people, economy, and nature, aligning with the ESG framework.
- This approach ensures efficient resource deployment and fosters institutional mechanisms that enhance effectiveness across sectors and stakeholders.
Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) is a framework to evaluate compliance of environmental aspects, social aspects and corporate governance aspects of an organisation. ESG became a responsible investing or impact investing benchmark for investors. It first came into prominence in a 2004 report titled “Who Cares Wins”, which was a United Nations (UN) triggered joint initiative of financial institutions. However, by 2021, it has become a global phenomenon worth US $ 30 trillion from its initial UN-driven Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative.
Criticism of ESG has also been significant, as all such mega global initiatives. The criticism ranges from data quality, reporting standardisation, evolving regulation, politics, greenwashing and even definition & assessment of social good. Lack of transparency is the biggest challenge that directly impinges on the trust deficit. We all know, trust deficit is the biggest culprit for low compliance.
Another way of looking at the ESG framework is the balance between people, economy and nature. In more clear terms, the three entities can be described as follows:
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Dr. (Cdr.) Arnab Das
Founder and Director, MRC, Pune
Dr (Cdr) Arnab Das is the director and Founder of MRC, Pune. He is an ex-Naval officer with two decades of active service and PhD holder from IIT Delhi with a specialization in Underwater Acoustics. He has worked on several projects and has many publications to his credit.