Summer 2024 Highlights: SESAMm’s Latest on ESG, AI Innovations, and Industry Recognition

As 2024 comes to a close, I’m proud to reflect on SESAMm’s achievements and energized by the opportunities that lie ahead. This year has been a milestone for our growth, partnerships, and technological advancements, setting a strong foundation to tackle the challenges and embrace the possibilities of 2025.

Looking Back on 2024: Key Achievements

Strengthening Client Partnerships and Expanding Our Reach

This year, SESAMm welcomed an impressive roster of new clients, in particular working more closely with LPs such as Swen Capital, banks, and asset managers such as Natixis, alongside numerous mid-market asset managers and private equity funds. These organizations are turning to SESAMm for more control over their ESG data and access to granular controversy insights, reaffirming our role as a trusted partner in sustainable finance. We also launched impactful partnerships with Ramboll, ARX, FinGreen, and CybelAngel, among others, broadening our reach and capabilities.

Building a Stronger Team and Advancing Our Technology

Internally, we strengthened our team with strategic hires, including our first team member in Canada, to better support our clients locally. On the technology front, we achieved significant milestones: introducing new platform features, launching a comprehensive product documentation help page, and reaching the capacity to process nearly 30 billion documents—our largest scale yet.

Adapting to a Dynamic ESG Landscape

Globally, the ESG landscape was marked by notable developments. Europe focused heavily on CSRD compliance, while Asia advanced new ESG mandates and regulations in South Korea, Japan, and Singapore. Despite regulatory shifts in the U.S., SESAMm experienced strong growth in North America, demonstrating our ability to adapt and thrive globally.

Innovating with Generative AI

This year also saw the integration of generative AI into our solutions, reshaping how we deliver value to clients. Risk Reveal, for example, enables automated controversy report generation and real-time insights.

Looking Ahead to 2025: Rising to ESG Challenges

Embracing ESG Challenges

As we close out 2024, the momentum in ESG shows no signs of slowing down. With new regulations like CS3D and evolving global frameworks, companies face mounting demands to monitor not only their investments but also their supply chains while improving transparency across the board. SESAMm remains committed to enhancing its tools to meet these challenges, delivering faster, more actionable insights to corporate and investment clients alike.

Harnessing the Potential of AI

The evolution of AI presents a major opportunity. Advances in generative models will enable us to further increase the scale and quality of our data processing. Our focus will remain on refining interpretation and reporting capabilities, empowering clients to make smarter, data-driven decisions on millions of companies with minimal friction.

The year ahead will undoubtedly bring its share of challenges, but it also holds incredible potential for progress. SESAMm is committed to remaining at the forefront of ESG and AI innovation, helping businesses not only adapt to change but lead it.
None of this progress would be possible without the trust and collaboration of our clients, partners, and team members. Thank you for making this year a success. Together, we are shaping the future of finance and sustainability. Here’s to another year of growth, innovation, and positive impact in 2025!

Reach out to SESAMm

TextReveal’s web data analysis of over five million public and private companies is essential for keeping tabs on ESG investment risks. To learn more about how you can analyze web data or to request a demo, reach out to one of our representatives.

SESAMm’s Dashboards Provide Deep Insights into Real Estate, Energy, Mining, and More

Informed decisions require the right data. SESAMm offers ESG professionals the flexibility to analyze not only the smallest of private companies but also to drill down to the project level.

What do we mean by projects? Investable capital projects and infrastructure assets, such as real estate, energy, infrastructure funds, and mining projects. For this article, we’ve set up our Event Monitoring dashboards to track mining projects.

Our Event Monitoring Dashboards automatically track, evaluate, and categorize ESG controversies using 90 ESG risk categories. The controversies are given an Intensity Score, a proprietary metric that evaluates the severity of a controversy using a scale of 1-5 (with 5 being the most severe).

In the Portfolio Monitoring view, the projects are ranked by the number of unique controversies and their intensity under each of the three ESG pillars. Using this view, users quickly identify the most at-risk project.

Each project also has a dedicated ESG controversy monitoring page providing insight into the controversy trends over time, access to the articles driving the alerts, and heatmaps showing the controversy distribution and intensity by subrisk. Altogether, it gives users clear visibility into the ESG risks related to the project.

Controversies Over Time: Samarco Mine

Controversies Heatmp: Samarco Mine

While this example has tackled mining projects, there are few limits to what TextReveal can do. SESAMm has the largest data lake in the industry, boasting over 15 years of data and 25 billion documents. This data lake, combined with our advanced AI capabilities, allows us to track millions of companies and their subsidiaries, individual dual-listed entities, projects, countries, and more.

Request a demo to see TextReveal in action and discover how you can use it to track and monitor projects for ESG controversies and risks.

Reach out to SESAMm

TextReveal’s web data analysis of over five million public and private companies is essential for keeping tabs on ESG investment risks. To learn more about how you can analyze web data or to request a demo, reach out to one of our representatives.

Wildfires used to be a summer story. For most of the last decade, they arrived with the Northern Hemisphere dry season, dominated a few weeks of headlines, and receded once the rains came. That is no longer a safe assumption. Los Angeles burned in January 2025, a month that has historically been the quietest of the year for wildfire news anywhere in the world. Canada lost more forest in 2023 than in any year in its recorded history. Greece, Spain, and Portugal now post record-breaking fires in years that are not supposed to be their worst.

Given how much the pattern itself seems to be changing, we wanted to look past the headlines and into the data: how has coverage of wildfires actually moved over the past seven years, what does the aftermath of these fires look like once the smoke clears, and which countries, and companies, keep reappearing in the story. The analysis below sets out what the data shows, and, where it helps to understand it, what was actually happening on the ground at the time.

Executive summary

This analysis reviews global wildfire mentions between 2019 and 2026 across three lenses: quarterly mention volume, ESG sub-risk classification, and country-level geographic distribution, cross-referenced against documented public reporting. Three findings stand out: (1) wildfire coverage has shifted from a seasonal pattern to a sustained, year-round baseline since 2023; (2) coverage volume tracks proximity to population centers and identifiable liable parties more closely than it tracks the physical scale of the fire itself; and (3) the dominant subject matter in wildfire-related ESG coverage is the aftermath (casualties, contaminated water and air, insurance exposure, litigation) rather than the fire event in isolation.

1. Mention volume over time: a seasonal story becomes a year-round one

For most of the period, the data follows a predictable four-quarter cycle: Q1 is the annual low, Q2 shows a moderate rise, Q3 spikes with the Northern Hemisphere dry season, and Q4 falls back. That cycle breaks in two places, and both breaks mark a structural change rather than a one-off event.

• Q4 2023 does not return to baseline after the Q3 peak: coverage stays elevated into the final quarter for the first time in the dataset.
• Q1 2025, historically the lowest-volume quarter of the year, reaches roughly 270,000 mentions, more than several previous Q3 peaks.

The floor is the more telling number. In the quarters before 2023, non-peak volume rarely exceeded 80,000 mentions. From 2023 onward, even the quietest quarters do not fall below roughly 110,000–190,000. Wildfires have moved from a seasonal hazard to a year-round subject of coverage.

It's worth noting what does not explain this shift: acreage burned. 2020 through 2022, the years directly before this data climbs, include some of the largest fires by area in modern US and European history, yet register comparatively modest mention volume, partly because those years overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic, which absorbed a large share of global news capacity.

The years that do dominate the chart, 2023 and 2025, are not necessarily the years with the most land burned; they are the years fire reached population centers and produced an identifiable party to blame. The Lahaina, Marshall, and Los Angeles fires are all comparatively small by area next to the 2020 US West Coast season or Canada's 2023 season, but generated substantially more coverage because of death toll, structures destroyed, and utility liability. Acreage, in short, is a weak predictor of coverage; proximity and blame are strong ones.

What was happening on the ground behind each peak

Each Q3 peak in the dataset lines up with a specific, documented cluster of events:

• Q3 2021: the Dixie Fire destroys the town of Greenville, California; PG&E is investigated for potential criminal liability; concurrent wildfires in Greece and evacuations in Turkey land in the same window.
• Q3 2022: fires threaten the Yosemite region and Sequoia groves in California; Spain and Portugal report wildfires during a European heat wave; a federal review attributes a New Mexico wildfire to a botched prescribed burn.
• Q3 2023: Canada's wildfire season becomes the largest on record, roughly 15–18 million hectares burned, eight firefighter deaths, and up to 232,000 evacuations, and sends smoke over the northeastern US, pushing New York City's air quality index to a peak of 465 on June 7. In the same window, the Maui fires trigger a negligence lawsuit against Hawaiian Electric, and in Greece, the Evros fire burns roughly 93,000 hectares, described by wildfire researchers as the largest single wildfire recorded in modern European history, days after the Rhodes evacuation of roughly 19,000 people, which Greek authorities called the country's largest-ever wildfire evacuation.
• Q3–Q4 2024: a wildfire cuts power to Labrador; another burns near Suncor's Firebag oil-sands site in Alberta; Jasper, Alberta is significantly damaged; Greek investigators attribute the country's worst fire of the year to a faulty power cable.
• Q1 2025 (the anomaly): a 14-fire outbreak tears through Los Angeles and San Diego County over January 7–31 on Santa Ana winds; the Palisades and Eaton fires alone destroy more than 18,000 structures and kill at least 31 people, with over 200,000 evacuated. Property-value loss is estimated at roughly $31 billion by CoStar, with total economic loss estimated between $250–275 billion by AccuWeather. Days later, the European Forest Fire Information System reports more than 100,000 hectares burned across the EU by the end of March, three months ahead of the typical season.

Across every year in the dataset, the same mechanism converts a fire into a sustained story: ignition (lightning, arson, or utility equipment failure) combines with drought and wind to produce the initial event, but litigation and identified liability sustain the coverage long after the fire is contained. PG&E, Southern California Edison, PacifiCorp, and Hawaiian Electric recur as named defendants across separate fires and separate years.

2. ESG sub-risk classification: ranked aftermath analysis

Wildfire-related controversies were classified into ESG sub-risk categories at the point of media mention. The ranking below runs from highest to lowest mention volume, with a documented, sourced example behind each category.

1. Community Health & Safety: by far the largest category. PG&E's Fire Victim Trust had paid out approximately $5.36 billion to survivors of the Butte, North Bay, and Camp fires as of late 2023, with payouts raised to 70% of approved claims by August 2025 against a $13.5 billion settlement fund; PacifiCorp has now paid or been ordered to pay more than $2 billion across Oregon and California wildfire litigation, including a $575 million federal settlement, a $305 million jury verdict, and a $125 million settlement with Oregon wineries; Hawaiian Electric remains in an active negligence case over the Maui fires.
2. Climate Change: wildfires are framed as both symptom and accelerant. Canada's 2023 season burned at roughly seven times the historical average; researchers found climate change had tripled the underlying fire risk in the country's boreal forest, and the season released an estimated 1.5 billion metric tons of CO2, comparable to a decade of Canada's typical wildfire emissions.
3. Biodiversity & Ecosystems: tied mainly to two events: Australia's Black Summer, where a WWF-commissioned study estimated three billion animals killed, injured, or displaced, including more than 60,000 koalas; and the Amazon, where 2024 fires burned an estimated 15.6–22 million hectares, the worst season on record, with Brazil alone logging 237,000 individual fires.
4. Customer Relations: reflects the California property-insurance crisis: State Farm nonrenewed roughly 72,000 California policies in the two years before the January 2025 fires, then faced a state investigation into claims handling, including denial of hygienic smoke-damage testing, after the fires it did cover. A $1 billion FAIR Plan assessment was subsequently levied on insurers operating in California.
5. Right to Property: tied to the scale of destroyed real estate, an estimated $31 billion in property value destroyed in the January 2025 Los Angeles fires, and to litigation over responsibility for that loss, including Los Angeles County's lawsuit against Southern California Edison and Edison's countersuit against the county.
6. Occupational Health & Safety: firefighter casualties and injury: the NFPA recorded 83 US firefighter fatalities in 2025, up from 69 in 2024; Canada's 2023 season killed eight firefighters; South Korea's 2025 wildfire outbreak killed three firefighters among its 32 total fatalities.
7. Marketing & Communication: covers corporate communications during active disasters, including relief pledges, the Recording Academy and MusiCares pledged $1 million to Los Angeles wildfire relief in January 2025, and utility crisis messaging, which came under renewed scrutiny after Edison International executive pay continued to rise during the period the company faced Eaton Fire liability claims.
8. Water Pollution: municipal water contamination after urban-interface fires. Following the January 2025 Los Angeles fires, benzene and other volatile organic compounds were detected in the drinking water of the Palisades, Altadena, and surrounding service areas; a follow-up point-of-use study found benzene in 17% of sampled homes. The same pattern was documented after the 2017 Tubbs Fire (Santa Rosa) and 2018 Camp Fire (Paradise), both also PG&E-linked.
9. Working Conditions: wildland and municipal firefighting workforce strain during extended, overlapping fire seasons across multiple continents.
10. Atmospheric Pollution: principally the June 2023 Canadian smoke event: New York City's air quality index peaked at 465, with a 24-hour PM2.5 average nearly three times the US regulatory standard, and follow-on research linked the event to a 44–82% increase in asthma-related emergency-department visits in the city.
11. Rights of Indigenous Communities: most documented in Canada, where more than 40% of national wildfire evacuations historically involve Indigenous communities, including the 2023 evacuation of the majority-Indigenous Northwest Territories capital, Yellowknife; and in the Amazon basin, where Indigenous-managed territories have been found to sequester carbon at rates far exceeding non-Indigenous-managed land.
12. Accounting & Securities Fraud: the Edison International shareholder class action filed after the Eaton Fire, alleging the company misrepresented the readiness of its power-shutoff program; Edison's share price fell approximately 34% following the fire, and the suit names CEO Pedro Pizarro and CFO Maria Rigatti as defendants.

The remaining categories (Product Safety, Fundamental Human Rights, Energy & Natural Resources Management, Board of Directors & Senior Management, and Data Privacy & Cyber Security) account for smaller shares of classified documents and were not tied to a comparably documented recurring event pattern in this dataset.

3. Geographic distribution of coverage

The United States accounts for the largest share of country-level mentions throughout the period, without a single dominant spike: volume rises through 2023–2025, peaks around 2025, then falls sharply into 2026. That shape fits a continuing sequence of named utility liability cases (PG&E, Southern California Edison, PacifiCorp) more than it fits a single event.

Outside the US, coverage is more episodic, clustering around identifiable national events rather than building a sustained baseline:

• Australia peaks sharply around 2019–2020, matching Black Summer (24 million hectares burned, 33 deaths, an estimated three billion animals affected), then recedes.
• Canada rises from 2022 and peaks around 2025, matching the record 2023 season (roughly 15–18 million hectares, eight firefighter deaths, up to 232,000 evacuated) and the continuation of large fires in 2024, including Jasper.
• Greece shows a sustained late-period rise, matching the 2023 Rhodes evacuation and the Evros fire, followed by continued fire activity in 2024, including the faulty-power-cable fire investigators called the country's worst of the year.
• Spain shows its highest point at the end of the series, consistent with the unusually early 2025 season (100,000+ hectares burned across the EU by end of March) and recurring summer wildfire and heat-wave coverage in 2022.
• France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom register comparatively low, stable volumes throughout, with modest increases around 2024–2025 in line with the broader post-2023 elevated baseline rather than country-specific events.

Read together, US coverage behaves like an ongoing institutional and legal narrative anchored by utility litigation, while rest-of-world coverage behaves like a series of discrete, event-driven spikes tied to specific fire seasons.

Conclusion

Across mention volume, ESG classification, and geography, the evidence points to a consistent mechanism. Coverage volume is driven primarily by three factors: proximity of the fire to population centers, the presence of an identifiable liable party, typically a utility, and how much a competing global news cycle is absorbing attention capacity at the same time. The physical scale of a fire is, on its own, a comparatively weak predictor of how much coverage it receives. On that basis, the next spike in wildfire coverage is more likely to come from an urban-interface fire with a clear liability story than from the largest fire by area.