The Morningstar Sustainability Rating™ is a global research service for investors, focusing on companies’ ability to create sustainable value for their stakeholders. The Morningstar Sustainability Rating™ analyses factors assessing an investment’s environmental, social and governance, or ESG, attributes to give an independent assessment of the company's ESG performance relative to its industry peers and identified universe, for their publicly available securities.

Investors and stakeholders alike are increasingly turning to ESG as a metric to consider when making investment decisions, with long-term sustainability outcomes increasingly concerning many people who invest. As a result, Morningstar has developed the Sustainability Rating in order to provide a measure of the ESG performance of individual companies relative to their peers.

The Morningstar Sustainability Rating ™ is based on an evaluation of thousands of data points across a range of relevant ESG metrics. These include governance characteristics such as executive compensation, board and shareholder rights, as well as environmental and social impacts like labour practices, carbon emissions and data breaches. Morningstar additionally evaluates macro themes such as climate change, diversity and inclusion and human capital management to gain a full view of a company’s ESG performance.

The rating scale ranges from 1 to 5, with 1 constituting “Of Concern” and 5 expressing “Excellent”. Each rating category is explained in detail and average scores are provided both within and across industry sectors. Investors who currently use or provide access to ESG data such as investment managers, advisors and research firms are all able to access Morningstar’s ESG ratings.

Morningstar’s ESG Rating is part of the world's most comprehensive sustainability research effort which aims to uncover how sustainable investments align with investors’ environmental and social values, as well as a company’s competitive advantage and financial performance. Access to this research, which is available in over 11 languages, provides investors with independent, reliable, and comprehensive data and insights to enable them to make informed decisions.

The Morningstar Sustainability Rating™ has received global recognition as one of the most reliable and comprehensive ESG benchmarking indices and is used by many leading funds, funds supermarkets, banks, wealth platforms, and investment advisors, around the world. It is an invaluable tool for investors and businesses that are looking to identify companies that are making meaningful progress in creating long-term sustainable value. By leveraging Morningstar’s insights on a company’s ESG performance, investors and companies alike can better assess the impact their investments may have and make informed decisions on ESG investments.