Joanna Cound is Managing Director, Sarah Matthews is Director and Michelle Edkins is Managing Director at BlackRock, Inc. This post is based on BlackRock’s response to the Exposure Draft ED/2022/S2 Climate-Related Disclosures issued by the International Sustainability Standards Board.
This post is based on BlackRock’s response to The Exposure Draft ED/2022/S2 Climate-related Disclosures issued by the International Sustainability Standards Board. Below is the text of the letter with minor adjustments to eliminate the correspondence-related parts.
BlackRock manages assets on behalf of institutional and individual clients worldwide, across equity, fixed income, liquidity, alternatives, and multi-asset strategies. Our clients, the asset owners, include pension plans, endowments, foundations, charities, official institutions, insurers and other financial institutions, as well as individuals around the world. Because our clients have diverse financial objectives, we consider a variety of investment factors, risks, and opportunities, including those related to climate.
Asset managers investing on behalf of clients are not just looking for more data on climate risk; they need high-quality information that is (1) relevant to understanding climate- related risks and opportunities, and (2) reliable, timely, and comparable across jurisdictions. Investors also recognize that climate data, controls and risk methodologies are still evolving. As a fiduciary to our clients, BlackRock has engaged with public companies on climate disclosure over the past five years. We have observed these companies continually developing and adapting their climate risk management and reporting tools, improving the quality of their disclosure over time.
BlackRock strongly supports the ISSB’s goal of providing a global baseline of standards to support the disclosure of more reliable, comparable, and consistent climate-related information. We view both the ISSB Exposure Draft ED/2022/S1 on sustainability-related financial information and ED/2022/S2 on climate-related disclosure as important contributions to a multi-year, multi-jurisdictional effort towards improving the availability, quality, comparability, timeliness, and interoperability of sustainability-related disclosures.