From compliance to competitive edge
Bloomberg’s experts outline how demand for decision-useful sustainability data is rapidly evolving
Environmental Finance: What are the overarching trends driving demand for sustainable data at the moment?
Patricia Torres, global head of sustainable finance solutions: We’re at a defining point in sustainable finance. Investors are returning to their core purpose, evaluating how sustainability factors influence financial performance, risk, and long-term value creation.
At times, the pace of adoption outstripped consistency and comparability. That led to questions around what was being measured – and how. What we’re seeing now is a healthy shift to a more analytical, grounded, and forward-looking approach.
Investors are asking sharper questions: how environmental and social risks translate into changes in cost of capital, operational resilience, or asset valuation; and, which risks – or opportunities – are not yet priced into today’s markets, but could materialise sooner than expected?
This shift is fueling demand for high-quality, forward-looking, and decision-useful sustainability data. At Bloomberg, we’re meeting that demand by delivering analytics that connect sustainability to value – empowering more informed capital allocation, risk management, and regulatory alignment.
EF: What are your clients’ key concerns?
Nadia Humphreys, global head of sustainable finance data: Investors continue to grapple with sparse and inconsistently reported company sustainability data, making it difficult to assess risk exposure and investment opportunities with confidence. While International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) reporting across multiple global jurisdictions should improve the availability and consistency of company-reported data, disclosure obligations are not yet globally consistent.
Investors also face challenges in measuring the financial impact of climate and nature-related risks. The limitations of traditional approaches to transition risk and challenges of downscaling climate scenarios to company and security-level impacts make it difficult to confidently assess transition risks and perform stress-testing to meet regulatory or investor reporting.
Global surveys show that institutional investors expect further acceleration of these trends. The market for sustainability data is becoming more about enabling alpha generation and risk-adjusted returns.
Reliable, decision-useful data and analytics are critical in this environment. At Bloomberg, we’re addressing this by delivering transparent, financially relevant sustainability data, seamlessly integrated into our analytics, research, and portfolio tools, to facilitate decision making.
EF: How have your offerings evolved in line with this?
PT: Bloomberg’s sustainable finance solutions help clients navigate a more complex, data-driven investment environment – anchored in financial materiality and aligned with long-term value creation.
Over the past year, we’ve expanded our data coverage and developed tools that support risk and opportunity analysis:
- Carbon emissions forecasts for over 67,000 companies and transition risk analytics for 70,000+ entities through Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s (BNEF) TRACT model.
- Physical climate risk assessments for 48,000+ companies – tracking exposure to heat stress, flooding, wildfires, and more.
- Biodiversity and nature risk analytics for 50,000 companies, with metrics on deforestation, water stress, and proximity to vulnerable ecosystems.
- MARS Climate, our climate risk management platform to analyse climate-related vulnerabilities, perform scenario analysis, and support regulatory reporting across 95,000+ companies.
- Our sustainability-linked fixed income data now covering 150,000+ labelled instruments, including impact reporting and use- of-proceeds data – helping investors assess whether capital is flowing toward real-world outcomes.
- A partnership with Viridios Group to deliver high-integrity carbon credit data and pricing analytics directly on the Bloomberg Terminal.
At the core of our approach is one belief: sustainability data should be embedded in financial decision-making, not adjacent to it. That’s how we help clients translate complexity into insight and strategy into action.
EF: What are your future development plans?
NH: We are focused on expanding what the market values most: granular, timely, and actionable sustainability data that can be integrated into investment workflows.
We are enhancing our physical risk analytics through a new geolocation service, enabling users to assess site-specific climate vulnerabilities.
We’re also scaling our supply chain intelligence to cover over 120,000 public and private companies, helping clients assess exposure to physical risk that extend beyond direct holdings.
In the voluntary carbon market, we are improving transparency, building on our partnership with Viridios Group to deliver project-level data and analytics that support confident participation.
Finally, as regulatory frameworks like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and ISSB gain traction, we’re investing in mapped and modeled sustainability data that enables clients to meet disclosure obligations and assess sustainability performance with consistency and credibility.
Because ultimately, our mission is clear: to deliver the data and insights that allow clients to manage sustainability not just as a compliance exercise – but as a source of competitive advantage.
For more information, see: www.bloomberg.com/professional/ products/data/enterprise-catalog
