Data analytics and AI in ESG, climate change and sustainability: A practitioner's handbook

Abstract

This handbook began as a course module and grew into something more urgent.When the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures published its recommendations in 2017, thesustainability community gained a shared vocabulary for risk. When the Corporate SustainabilityReporting Directive came into force in Europe and the International Sustainability Standards Board issuedits inaugural disclosure standards in 2023, that vocabulary became mandatory for tens of thousands oforganisations. And when the UN Climate Change Conferences from Paris to Dubai produced nationallydetermined contributions that required hard measurement, the gap between ambition and evidence becamethe defining professional challenge of our time.That challenge is a data challenge. Organisations that cannot measure their emissions cannot crediblycommit to reducing them. Investment portfolios that cannot quantify biodiversity exposure cannot claim tomanage it. Governments that cannot track deforestation in near-real time cannot enforce the policies theyhave signed. The missing link between ambition and accountability is analytics, and increasingly it isartificial intelligence.This handbook is written for the practitioners who occupy that gap: the analyst pricing carbon risk into acredit model, the sustainability manager selecting a reporting framework, the data engineer building thepipeline that feeds the board dashboard, and the senior leader deciding how much of the analytical frontiertheir organisation should reach for. It assumes numeracy but not specialist training in any single domain. Itdraws on three currents simultaneously: sustainability science, data analytics and artificial intelligence.The handbook is organised around a four-layer framework. The first layer is Data: the infrastructure,open-source tools and measurement conventions that make everything else possible. The second layer isAnalytics: the ESG metrics, decision frameworks and geospatial methods that transform rawmeasurements into insight. The third layer is AI: the machine learning, natural language processing andforecasting methods that amplify analytical reach. The fourth layer is Impact: the reporting standards, SDGinvestment frameworks and organisational capabilities that turn insight into durable institutional change.Each chapter opens with a single Core Proposition stated before any story, follows a deductive argumentthrough theory and worked example, and closes with reflective exercises that require the reader to applythe chapter's ideas to their own context. The Clinical Vignettes are composites; the Field Narratives usereal, documented cases with full attribution. Every cited work appears in the reference list.A note on the open-source tools. The GitHub repositories featured in Part I and Part II are real, maintainedand freely usable. The authors have no commercial relationship with any of them. They are featuredbecause practitioners should know they exist, what they do reliably, and where they sit in the broaderanalytical stack.A note on the I-ESG framework. This handbook integrates the Integrated ESG (I-ESG) philosophydeveloped by two of the present authors through years of practice in high-hazard industries. I-ESGrecognises that Governance is not a third pillar alongside Environment and Social, but the closed-loopcontrol system that anchors Process Safety Management, Asset Integrity Management and OperationaliiExcellence to ESG outcomes. Practitioners from the oil and gas, mining and heavy manufacturing sectorswill find this framing directly applicable to their operating reality.The authors are grateful to the sustainability practitioners, engineers and data scientists across multiplesectors and jurisdictions whose questions shaped these chapters, and to the researchers whose workprovides the evidential foundation for every claim made here. We are equally grateful to our institutionalhomes—PT Artificial Intelligent Indonesia and Convergeni by Patria & Co.—for the intellectual freedomand practical challenge that made this handbook possible.Harry Patria, Riandhy, and Zulkifli Jakarta, October 2026