Last week, risk assessment firm Moody’s announced the launch of Net Zero Assessment – a scoring framework for evaluating organizations’ decarbonization plans and progress. With trillions of dollars in finance needed to fund global decarbonization, Moody’s – along with peers like Bloomberg, MSCI and S&P Global – is rapidly developing the mechanisms to steer that money, in a category we call climate financial data. Our research shows that many of these providers are already tracking firms’ net zero targets or – like S&P Global’s Trucost Paris Alignment Dataset – assessing their carbon intensity.

In this newest innovation, Moody’s looks keen to go a step further. The Net Zero Assessment framework will assign each organization a rating from one to five based on Moody’s confidence that its decarbonization profile is in line with a Paris Agreement-aligned 1.5 degree warming scenario, as assessed from the firm’s actual plans, their implementation and emissions reduction governance. For more about climate financial data, see Verdantix Smart Innovators: Net Zero Financial Data And Analytics Providers.