The UK has made into the list of top ten in Refinitiv’s new country-specific sustainable development scores, launched on today (19 October) to measure how extensively each country meets the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).
The UK gained one of the top scores across all countries examined by Refinitiv, beaten only by Denmark with a score of 9.25. The next 12 top-performing countries, which also include Germany, France and Sweden, all gained a score of 9, the same as the UK.
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The new scoring system is designed to provide comparisons at the country level for fund managers, advisers and investors as to how each country is performing in terms of the 17 UN SDGs and 148 benchmarked metrics.
The scores, which are calculated on an annual basis, cover 210 countries in total, with an overall SDG level and individual metric level performance scores available for each country.
Top 25 Countries with the highest SDG Scores (%):
| Ranking | Country | Overall Score |
| 1 | Norway | 9.25 |
| 2 | United Kingdom | 9 |
| 3 | Switzerland | 9 |
| 4 | Sweden | 9 |
| 5 | Netherlands | 9 |
| 6 | Iceland | 9 |
| 7 | Germany | 9 |
| 8 | Denmark | 9 |
| 9 | Finland | 9 |
| 10 | France | 9 |
| 12 | Austria | 9 |
| 13 | Monaco | 9 |
| 14 | Czech Republic | 8.75 |
| 15 | Belgium | 8.5 |
| 16 | Luxembourg | 8.5 |
| 17 | Australia | 8.5 |
| 18 | New Zealand | 8.5 |
| 19 | Estonia | 8.25 |
| 20 | Japan | 8 |
| 21 | Uruguay | 8 |
| 22 | United States | 8 |
| 23 | Spain | 8 |
| 24 | Slovenia | 8 |
| 25 | Portugal | 8 |
To calculate the scores, Refinitiv uses a bottom-up approach which maps 242 detailed indicators that feed into each of the 17 SDGs against the 8.5 million active economic indicators available through its macroeconomic time series database Datastream.
Where there are two or more countries with the same final score, further analysis and differentiation could take place to help investors make an informed choice, Refinitiv said.
Leon Saunders Calvert, head of sustainable investing at Lipper and I&A Insights, Refinitiv, said: “Sovereign issuance of capital is a critical component of sustainable financing and being able to quantify, for the purposes of investment allocation decisions, the ESG footprint of countries as well of companies makes this enhancement an important augmentation of the assets that Refinitiv continues to bring to bear to support the mainstreaming of ESG data into financial markets.”
The latest launch follows Refinitiv bringing out Fund ESG Scores earlier this year, as well as the combination of Refinitiv’s ESG Sustainable Investing and Lipper Fund Ratings businesses back in 2019 with the aim to “unearth links between sustainable business strategies and financial performance”.
