Fitch Ratings-Paris-29 January 2026: Fitch Ratings has published Fitch General ESG Approach, a report which details Fitch Rating’s approach to addressing environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations in its credit ratings.
Fitch’s credit analysis factors in ESG considerations to the extent they are relevant and material to a credit rating decision. The report discusses Fitch’s approach to assessing and disclosing the relevance and materiality of ESG considerations to Fitch’s credit rating decisions for global public international-scale ratings across different sectors: corporates, financial institutions, structured finance, covered bonds, sovereigns, supranationals, public finance, and global infrastructure.
For different sectors or sub-sectors, Fitch maps the specific issues that may drive its assessment of the relevance and materiality of ESG general issues to the credit rating decision to the relevant rating drivers, rating factors, or analytical considerations addressed in our applicable criteria. An overview of this mapping is detailed in our accompanying report, Fitch ESG Sector Mapping Compendium.
Fitch discloses the relevance and materiality of ESG considerations to individual credit rating decisions through its ESG relevance scores (ESG.RS). ESG.RS are not an input into the credit rating process but provide transparency on ESG-related credit risks that influenced the determination of credit ratings.