Institutional investors looking to score potential investments on environmental, social and governance factors now have a new option.
Bloomberg is launching its own set of ESG scores, available to its terminal users. Initially, 252 companies in the oil and gas sector will receive environmental and social scores and more than 4,300 companies across several industries will be scored on their board composition.
“ESG data is critical to the investment process,” said Patricia Torres, global head of Bloomberg sustainable finance solutions, in a press release. “We see an opportunity to provide transparent and complete scoring methodologies along with the underlying data in order to support investment and finance professionals make informed decisions.
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“By providing transparent ESG data and scores, we are helping investors decode raw data that is otherwise hard to compare across companies. For corporates, these scores offer a valuable, quantitative and normalized benchmark that will easily highlight their ESG performance.”
Bloomberg is launching with scores on environmental and social issues for the oil and gas sector because it typically has stronger disclosure data and generates a substantial portion of global green-house gas emissions, noted the release. The scores evaluate company performance on a number of financially material issues including climate change, health and safety and companies’ activities relative to industry peers.
Meanwhile, the governance score is intended to allow investors to analyze how well a board is positioned to have diverse perspectives and management supervision, as well as to find possible risks in board structures.
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