Sustainability Uncertainty Indexes (ESGUI)

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We are pleased to host the ESG-Related Uncertainty Index (ESGUI), also known as the Sustainability Uncertainty Index, created by Serdar Ongan, Ismet Gocer, and Cem Isik for their article titled "Introducing the New ESG-Based Sustainability Uncertainty Index (ESGUI)," published in Sustainable Development, 2025.

The authors construct monthly ESGUI for 25 countries from 2002 in three steps. First, the environmental (E), social (S), and governance (G) sub-indices are created based on selected ESG-related keywords from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) monthly country reports. The keywords were processed using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to compute monthly indices for E, S, and G by dividing the frequency of ESG-related terms by the total words in each report, then normalizing the results using the Min-Max Scaler method.

Second, an uncertainty sub-index is constructed using the same methodology but focusing on keywords like "uncertain," "uncertainty," and "uncertainties" to reflect global uncertainty levels as described in the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) by Ahir, Bloom, and Furceri.

Finally, the ESGUI is calculated (separately for each country) by averaging the ESG sub-index and uncertainty sub-index values by month. The authors also compute a global ESGUI in two forms as Global-equal-weighted and Global-GDP-weighted means of country-level ESGUI indices. Following the approach of Dang et al. (2023) and Chung et al. (2022), the values were scaled (normalized) to ensure that the maximum value is 100 and the minimum value is 0.

For the article and ESGUI series (indices) developed by Ongan, Gocer, and Isik, please use the following citation:

Ongan, Serdar, Gocer, Ismet, and Isik, Cem. (2025). Introducing the New ESG-Based Sustainability Uncertainty Index (ESGUI). Sustainable Development. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.3351