  Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) are non-financial factors that
are garnering attention from investors as they increasingly look to apply these
as part of their analysis to identify material risks and growth opportunities.
Some of this attention is also driven by clients who, now more aware than ever,
are demanding for their money to be managed and invested responsibly. As the
interest in ESG grows, so does the need for investors to have access to
consumable ESG information. Since most of it is in text form in reports,
disclosures, press releases, and 10-Q filings, we see a need for sophisticated
NLP techniques for classification tasks for ESG text. We hypothesize that an
ESG domain-specific pre-trained model will help with such and study building of
the same in this paper. We explored doing this by fine-tuning BERTs pre-trained
weights using ESG specific text and then further fine-tuning the model for a
classification task. We were able to achieve accuracy better than the original
BERT and baseline models in environment-specific classification tasks.
