Home / Why ratings differ

Educational · classification A

Why ESG ratings differ — and why Atmos refuses a single magic number

If you have ever looked up the same company in two ESG products and got two stories, that is normal. It is not proof that one vendor is “correct”. Atmos is built around that fact: three pillars, a source badge, and no claim to be MSCI or Sustainalytics.

Three reasons scores diverge

A well-known paper in the Review of Finance — Berg, Kölbel and Rigobon (2022), “Aggregate Confusion: The Divergence of ESG Ratings” — groups the disagreement into scope (which issues count), measurement (how each issue is scored), and weighting (how pillars are mixed). You do not need their dataset to use the idea: a headline letter grade hides all three choices.

Source: doi.org/10.1093/rof/rfac033. Atmos does not reproduce that paper’s numbers, and does not claim to replicate any commercial rating.

From July 2026 the EU ESG Ratings Regulation is scheduled to apply to ESG rating providers. Atmos is not positioning itself as an authorised EU ESG rating: the numbers on this site and in the app are labelled estimates for education and portfolio tracking. That is a product choice, not a loophole.

What Atmos does instead

• Shows E, S and G separately so a strong governance estimate cannot quietly bury a weak environmental one (see Shell or Tesla).
• Labels the source: curated profile, web intel, private estimate, or industry model.
• Lets you change pillar weights in the iOS app. That changes the composite, not the underlying estimates.
• Does not license MSCI, Sustainalytics, ISS or Refinitiv.

Full calculation notes: methodology.

What this page will not do

• Tell you which vendor to trust
• Say Atmos estimates predict returns or real-world impact
• Tell you what to buy or sell

If you want the same labelled estimates beside the holdings you actually own, screenshot the broker app on iPhone. Or look up a curated name first.