Climate Week NYC 2026 · Panel session

Measuring what publicly listed companies do to Black Americans.

The Corporate Racial Equity Score is a rigorous attempt to quantify corporate disparate impact — across 74 industries, eight value-chain stages, and the individual issuers investors actually hold. Its strongest evidence sits in environmental exposure.

Racial justice is also climate justice. The measures that carry the most weight in the framework are facility siting, emissions exposure and spatial access — the same evidence base environmental justice research has built over four decades, extended from who bears harm to who generates it.
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Date
Thursday 24 September 2026
Time
11:00 – 12:00 ET
Format
Zoom webinar · recording sent
Cost
Free

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Registration includes the session recording and the published methodology summary.

Joining by Zoom. The join link and a calendar invite arrive by email the moment you register. We'll send one reminder and the recording afterwards — no other email, and we don't share the list.

Presented by
Enith Martin Williams
Enith Martin Williams
Founder & Executive Director
Reparations Finance Lab

Founder and Executive Director of the Reparations Finance Lab and the Center for Reparations Finance and Practice — financial services nonprofits that engage private capital in reparative investment to address the racial wealth gap for descendants of the transatlantic slave trade globally. Previously an international banker at Merrill Lynch, and worked with economic development agencies within the Government of Jamaica.

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David Scatterday
David Scatterday
Managing Director, Scatterday & Associates
RFL Collaborator

Architect of the Corporate Racial Equity Score methodology and the scoring platform behind it, covering the measurement framework, the federal data mapping across twenty-seven social determinant variables, and the issuer-level scoring engine. Scatterday & Associates co-builds technology with mission-driven organisations and is a named RFL collaborator.

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Alejandro Navas
Alejandro Navas
Climate Transition Finance
CFA, CMA

Climate transition finance specialist working across asset-level decarbonisation modelling and corporate sustainability strategy. At WTW he built the analytical methods behind a Climate Transition Index covering more than 5,000 companies and led decarbonisation consulting for corporate and government clients. Holds an M.Sc. in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance from the University of Oxford.

The score

A single, comparable measure of corporate racial harm.

The Corporate Racial Equity Score quantifies the disparate impact of publicly listed companies on Black Americans. It is, to our knowledge, the first framework to do this at the granularity capital markets require — not a sector-level signal or a governance checklist, but a measured score that attaches to an industry, a value-chain stage, and a named issuer.

Harm is evaluated against the World Health Organization's Social Determinants of Health framework: twenty-seven variables across six domains that together determine how long people live and how well. Each variable is measured on a named federal statistical series with a Black and White breakout, so a disparity is observed rather than asserted.

Where a determinant is spatial — pollution exposure, food and pharmacy access, transport isolation — harm is measured by joining facility and site coordinates to census demographics at the geography where exposure actually occurs. These are the framework's best-evidenced vectors, and they are the ones environmental justice research made measurable.

Every score carries a confidence interval and a published evidence base. Where the evidence does not support a number, the framework declines to produce one — a property we regard as essential rather than inconvenient.

74
Industries measuredDecomposed across eight value-chain stages and delivered at 163 sub-industries
27
Social determinantsEach mapped to a federal series with a Black and White breakout
2,000
Simulations per scoreProducing credible intervals, not point estimates
2
Independent scoring routesRun on every issuer and reconciled against each other
Use cases

Built to be used, not just published.

The score is designed to enter existing investment processes at the points where decisions are already made.

01

Capital allocation

Screen and tilt on measured harm intensity rather than disclosure quality. Sits alongside an existing climate or environmental screen using compatible exposure data, rather than requiring a separate process.

02

Portfolio rebalancing

Quantify the harm exposure embedded in current holdings, identify where it concentrates by industry and value-chain stage, and rebalance toward lower-harm alternatives within the same exposure.

03

Performance evaluation

Track harm intensity as a portfolio metric over time, attribute changes to holdings versus underlying corporate conduct, and evaluate managers on a measured basis.

04

Measurement and reporting

Give reparative capital commitments a defensible denominator. Every figure traces to a named, vintage-pinned federal source and can be independently reconstructed.

Strategic foundation

Harm is multi-dimensional, so the measurement is too.

A single harm number collapses distinctions that matter. The WHO Social Determinants of Health framework gives the score a multi-dimensional foundation with standing in public health — established independently of this work, and therefore not designed around a conclusion.

Economic Stability

6 variables

Employment, income, expenses, debt, medical bills, support programmes. Measured through ACS race-iterated tables and HMDA loan-level records.

Neighborhood & Physical EnvironmentStrongest evidence

5 variables

Housing, transportation, safety, walkability and geographic exposure. Anchored on EPA facility and release registries joined to census block groups — the one domain where exposure is observed directly at the harm site.

Education

5 variables

Literacy, language, early childhood, vocational and higher education. Attainment measured at tract level; outcomes at institution level.

Community, Safety & Social Context

5 variables

Social integration, support systems, engagement, discrimination and justice-system contact.

Food

2 variables

Food security and access to healthy options. Access is a siting question, measured with the same spatial methods used for pollution exposure.

Health Care System

4 variables

Coverage, provider availability, cultural and linguistic competency, and quality of care.

Each of the twenty-seven variables is scored across eight value-chain stages defined as sets of six-digit NAICS codes. Because federal datasets are NAICS-keyed, a stage's activity level is a database query rather than an analyst's estimate.

Environmental justice

The environmental vectors carry the strongest evidence in the framework.

Facility registries joined to census demographics support causal attribution rather than correlation — a standard most social determinants cannot meet. The measurement techniques environmental justice research has refined over decades are the ones that make corporate attribution defensible here.

Siting
Facility coordinates joined to block-group racial composition measure exposure disparity at the geography where harm occurs.
Emissions
Toxicity-weighted release data supports a dose–response gradient, isolating the industry-attributable share of an observed disparity.
Access
Food, pharmacy and transport deserts are siting decisions. The spatial methods that measure pollution measure them equally well.

Measuring corporate racial harm and measuring environmental injustice are substantially the same measurement problem, approached from opposite directions.

Session agenda

An hour that is mostly method.

Four segments, walked end to end on two worked sectors — including one where the framework declines to publish a score, and why that restraint is a feature.

01Framework for corporate accountability

What the Corporate Racial Equity Score measures and why the WHO Social Determinants of Health framework provides a multi-dimensional foundation that a single harm number cannot.

02Statistical methodology deep-dive

How an observed disparity becomes a defensible attribution — the coefficients, the value-chain conservation rule, and the propagated uncertainty behind every published score.

03Capital markets applications

Working the score into allocation, rebalancing and performance evaluation, including what issuer-level coverage does and does not yet support.

04Moving toward reparative capital allocation

Where the framework goes next, and what measured harm makes possible for institutions committing capital on a reparative basis.

Who should attend

Built for people who will interrogate the method.

Allocators and managers
If you already screen on environmental criteria and have wondered what a racial-harm overlay would require methodologically, this is that answer.
Impact and ESG research
Value-chain decomposition and racial disaggregation are not features of existing frameworks. Come and pressure-test whether ours holds.
Climate and EJ organisations
The exposure methods here are the ones this field has used for decades, extended from who bears harm to who generates it.

Corporate Racial Equity Score

Climate Week NYC 2026. One hour, free, recorded. Registration includes the methodology summary.

Reserve your place