User Guide to MSCI’s Climate Metrics for the Energy Transition
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As the energy transition accelerates, investors face a growing challenge: navigating an expanding set of climate metrics designed to measure transition risk, opportunity, impact and alignment. At the same time, climate considerations are increasingly intersecting with energy security and capital-allocation decisions, creating new demands for investors.
This guide helps investors understand which climate metrics are most relevant for different climate-related objectives, with a focus on the transition. It provides a practical framework for evaluating metrics based on their purpose, methodology, time horizon and use case, while highlighting the distinctions between climate-impact and climate-risk metrics.
The paper explores how investors can use climate metrics to assess emissions exposure, evaluate transition risks, identify companies enabling the transition, measure portfolio alignment and support reporting, engagement and scenario analysis. It also provides an overview of MSCI’s climate metrics, helping investors identify the tools best suited to their objectives.
As climate-related strategies evolve, selecting the right metrics for the right objectives may become as important as the metric itself.
As of June 2026. All climate metrics shown are available at both the issuer and fund level, except for those marked with a dashed box, which are currently available only at the issuer level. Tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) is a metric used to compare greenhouse-gas emissions based on their global-warming potential by converting other gases into the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide with the same warming potential. Potential Emissions is based on fossil-fuel reserves. NZIF = Net Zero Investment Framework; SBTi = Science Based Targets initiative; WACI = Weighted Average Carbon Intensity. Carbon Credits is currently offered as a separate product from Climate Metrics. Source: MSCI Sustainability & Climate
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MSCI Energy Transition Score: A New Dimension of Risk
How can investors better gauge transition readiness? The MSCI Energy Transition Score provides new insights beyond existing metrics and shows limited market sensitivity across asset classes.
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