MSCI is making its ratings on environmental, social and governance issues publicly available off the back of growing interest from numerous stakeholders.
This move is part of MSCI ESG Research’s mission to help investors, companies and other industry stakeholders identify the most financially relevant ESG risks and opportunities, through greater transparency and access to ESG data and insights.
Information on more than 2,800 companies in the MSCI ACWI index can now be found through a search tool available on the firm’s website. And, MSCI plans to make ratings for 7,500 ACWI investible markets index constituents available in the new year.
“ESG is increasingly being viewed by global investors as a critical factor for building better portfolios,” said Remy Briand, head of ESG at MSCI, in a press release. “The decision to make the MSCI ESG ratings publicly available is part of a campaign to drive greater transparency in ESG and follows the launch of the MSCI ESG fund ratings in July. We want to encourage open discussion among investors and companies on how to improve sustainability across the board and hope that making the MSCI ESG ratings available to all will facilitate these discussions.”
MSCI’s ESG ratings rank companies on a scale from AAA to CCC relating to their exposure to ESG risks and how they handle those risks relative to industry peers. The ratings use 1,000 data points sourced from voluntarily disclosed information from the companies as well as alternative data sets, covering 37 distinct ESG issues.
With the newly publicly available tool, investors can see a company’s current ESG rating, how it’s performed over time and benchmark that performance against other companies.