Mitsui & Co., Ltd. ("Mitsui", Head Office: Tokyo, President and CEO: Kenichi Hori) has selected an initiative to establish a world-standard ESG assessment model using AI technology for the fifth recipient of a grant from the Mitsui & Co. Co-creation Fund ("the Fund").

In recent years, there has been increasing concern about the impact level of social issues caused by business activities, such as environmental damage that exceeds planetary boundaries, chain reactions between human rights violations and poverty, and negative impacts on human health and happiness. With companies now expected to take greater responsibility for environmental, human rights, and health risks across their entire supply chains, there has been a corresponding increase in the need for concrete sustainability initiatives and accountability.

Moreover, the concept of planetary health has become a focus of attention in the international community. This has resulted in growing scrutiny of how companies can restore planetary health, which has been impacted by climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation, while at the same time pursuing the enhancement of human well-being through their business activities, and embed both goals into a sustainable societal system. Meanwhile, data related to sustainability and planetary health is diverse and scattered across multiple sites making it difficult to visualize and assess, which in turn makes it harder to implement improvements across entire enterprises.

aiESG is a startup launched at Kyushu University. Its goal is to establish and implement a web-based system that uses AI technology to evaluate sustainability and planetary health data across entire enterprises. Specifically, it processes integrated big data, including public databases released by countries and international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Labour Organization (ILO), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as well as satellite and geospatial data, using proprietary AI models to quantify and visualize the environmental and human rights risks that could be incurred by corporate activities. Furthermore, aiESG's system conforms to global standards, such as the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) framework, which investors use to assess corporate ESG performance.

Through the Fund, Mitsui will support aiESG by leveraging the vast networks built via its deep involvement in global supply chains to facilitate the collection of frontline data from sources in Japan and overseas, which are difficult for university research institutes to obtain, and to connect the relevant parties for open discussions. Mitsui will also help aiESG to develop reality-based logic that reflects that data, and to create systems that will aid corporate disclosure and business decision-making, thereby contributing to the realization of a sustainable future.

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