The importance of environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria to investors is increasing rapidly around the world. Unsurprisingly, fund companies have raced to respond to this interest, both by launching rafts of new ESG offerings and trying to spiff up existing funds with an ESG gloss. This leaves investors with a lot of work to do to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Quantitative measures such as the Morningstar Sustainability rating are part of the solution, but to provide investors with even more analysis and context, we’ve developed a new measure, the Morningstar ESG Commitment Level for funds.

What is the Morningstar ESG Commitment Level?

This ESG Commitment Level expresses our analysts’ assessments of asset managers’ and individual strategies’ commitment to incorporating ESG into their investment organisation and processes. The scale runs from best to worst as follows: Leader, Advanced, Basic and Low.