Sandra Boss is Global Head of Investment Stewardship and Michelle Edkins is Managing Director of Investment Stewardship at BlackRock, Inc. This post is based on a BlackRock memorandum.
BlackRock’s role is to offer our clients a range of choices and help them make informed decisions to achieve their long-term financial objectives such as retirement. We do this as a fiduciary to our clients. Many of our clients are increasingly focused on the investment risks and opportunities associated with a transition to a lower-carbon economy. These clients seek to understand how companies are planning to mitigate risks and capture opportunities associated with this transition. Clients representing more than $3.3 trillion in assets entrusted to BlackRock have made net zero commitments as their own investment objective. These clients are particularly focused on obtaining clear, comparable, and high-quality climate-related disclosures to inform their investment decisions.
Given the role that climate risk and opportunities will play in our clients’ investment portfolios, BlackRock has consistently advocated for providing investors with high-quality, globally comparable climate-related disclosures.
There also is growing consensus that an orderly, just transition to net zero will benefit companies and the economy, which we believe will benefit our clients. We have also advocated for climate-related disclosures applied to both public and private companies. These disclosures should aim to enable informed investment decisions and support our clients’ investment and portfolio goals.
The foundation for climate-related disclosures, as we have consistently affirmed, is the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (“TCFD”). [1] TCFD is a principles-based approach, developed with input from investors and companies. Because of its relative simplicity and consistency, TCFD has garnered significant support from governments, central banks, and more than 2,600 organizations as of 2021, a 70% increase from 2020.