BlackRock Portfolio Managers have access to research, data, tools, and analytics to integrate ESG insights into their investment process. Aladdin is the operating system that connects the data, people and technology necessary to manage portfolios in real time, as well as the engine behind BlackRock’s ESG analytics and reporting capabilities. BlackRock’s Portfolio Managers use Aladdin to make investment decisions, monitor portfolios and to access material ESG insights that can inform the investment process to attain ESG characteristics of the fund.

ESG datasets are sourced from external third-party data providers, including but not limited to MSCI and Sustainalytics. These datasets include headline ESG scores, carbon data, business involvement metrics or controversies and have been incorporated into Aladdin tools that are available to Portfolio Managers. Such tools support the full investment process, from research, to portfolio construction and modeling, to reporting.

In addition to having access to these datasets in Aladdin, where applicable, Portfolio Managers could also supplement these sources with sell side research, non-government organization reports, company reported data, fundamental research insights prepared by BlackRock equity and credit investment research teams.

In order to offer scalable solutions to investors across different asset classes and investment styles, BlackRock has developed a set of exclusionary screens, “BlackRock EMEA Baseline Screens”, that seeks to address a majority of our clients’ requests for exclusions.

As an example, these exclusionary screens eliminate holdings with more than de minimis exposure to certain sectors/industries including but not limited to controversial weapons, nuclear weapons, fossil fuels, civilian firearms, tobacco, and UN Global Compact violators. BlackRock EMEA Baseline Screens are applied on all new active funds in Europe, Middle East and Africa (“EMEA”), on a comply or explain basis by our portfolio management teams within our product governance structure. For all new sustainable index strategies in EMEA, BlackRock works with the index provider to reflect the same screens in the custom index. Qualified investors with separate accounts can have exclusionary screens set with specific criteria as determined by the investor. The definition of the baseline screens and its adoption into sustainable screened funds is governed by the Sustainable Product Council (“SPC”). The current default ESG data provider for these Baseline Screens is MSCI but investment teams can choose to use Sustainalytics or other custom data sources as required.

For further SFDR related fund/sub-fund level disclosures, please refer to the fund/ sub-fund specific Investment Objective and Policy section(s) and benchmark information in the prospectus that is available on the website.