Sustainalytics

Inspiration

From sifting through emissions databases and drafting annual reports to navigating lengthy Excel spreadsheets, the work can be tiresome. It's troubling that as we undertake these repetitive tasks, vast amounts of carbon are still being emitted into our atmosphere, with the broader implications often deferred to future discussions. Thankfully, in response to such negligence, numerous governments have implemented more stringent regulations like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). This directive mandates the private sector to more diligently account for their environmental impact. Practices such as carbon accounting, life cycle assessments, and environmental product descriptions are becoming required frameworks for companies to evaluate their ecological footprint, covering everything from land use to manufacturing emissions. However, these requirements lead to extensive and data-heavy documentation, significantly increasing the amount of tedious work for sustainability analysts and companies as well. This is what inspired us to create Sustainalytics.

What it does

Sustainalytics is a AI-powered web-based application that allows companies to instantly receive comprehensive reports on their sustainability practices and ESG scores just by inputting data from their company logs in the form of a CSV file. By utilizing retrieval augmented generation with a vector database combined with advanced data parsing algorithms and multiple publicly accessible databases, Sustainalytics gives companies valuable insights and streamlines the process of creating a sustainability report through detailed graphs and visuals.

How we built it

Sustainalytics is built using a Next.js frontend with a Flask backend and Supabase as a database. For our frontend, we custom built our css and styles with the intention of creating a professional, friendly, and polished website. We use pandas to analyze government csv files. We then created a vector database of the extensive government documents using ChromaDB to perform retrieval augmented generation with Gemini 1.5 Pro. Finally, we use Chartjs to produce professional visualizations. ## Challenges we ran into One large challenge we ran into was learning and scraping all the data from the web. We needed to do a lot of research regarding all the things sustainability analysts needed to account for in order to create a tool for them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of using RAG, Gemini, Flask, and Next js, as we are all relatively unfamiliar with these technologies. In addition, we're proud of creating a robust and meaningful app.

What we learned

By creating Sustainlytics, everyone in our team learned many skills and used various technologies that we have not had much experience with before. We especially learned a lot about each of the iterations of the design process, ranging from brainstorming and prototyping to implementing and testing.

What's next for Sustainalytics

Creating complete sustainability reports with graphs, fully ready to go in the form of a PDF. 2. Uploading history and allowing companies to view and compare their historical data 3. An interactive AI feature where users can query in the dashboard and request specific visualizations

Built With

• gemini
• langchain
• nextjs
• supabase