10th October, 2007

Focus is on companies’ financial exposure to environment as Merrill Lynch & Trucost identify global carbon leaders.

Investors increasingly want to understand the material financial impact of environmental issues on their portfolios but have lacked the necessary consistent, comparable and quantifiable data. The ‘Carbon Leaders’ investment product, launched this week, enables investors to choose between otherwise successful companies on the basis of how environmental factors will affect their future business earnings.

Starting with Merrill Lynch’s rigorous business analysis, Trucost's proprietary modeling and its unique database of past corporate environmental performance is applied to pinpoint those successful global companies with a low exposure to future carbon pricing and other environmental issues.

Carbon Leaders is the first major product of its type and scale, focusing on existing blue chip corporations. It is not a ‘clean tech fund’ or similar product.

Simon Thomas, Chief Executive of Trucost, said, “Carbon Leaders substantiates Trucost’s long held view that mainstream investment decisions will increasingly have to factor in companies' carbon exposure. Only Trucost is in a position to judge this exposure accurately and robustly enough for mainstream financial products.”

"The ML Carbon Leaders Europe index offers exposure to low carbon footprint stocks with favourable valuation characteristics, and with climate change issues having been at the forefront of media through 2007, companies are facing increasing requirements for carbon disclosure, from investors, policy makers and consumers," said Zoe Knight, senior director of Socially Responsible Investing at Merrill Lynch.

"With the quantification of carbon, investors can evaluate possible implications on valuation, and thus take a view on the company’s environmental risk exposure. The ML Carbon Leaders Europe Index offers investors exposure to a high quality, low carbon footprint basket of stocks using a valuation framework that has been shown to outperform during all stages of the economic cycle."

Understanding the potential material financial impact of environmental issues on a portfolio is challenging in the absence of consistent or comprehensive environmental data disclosure by companies. Trucost’s comprehensive coverage and sophisticated modeling processes ensure that all companies in an index can be included, not just those that disclose environmental information.

Media contacts:

Trucost: Theo Moore, Brunswick Group, 020 7404 5959
Merrill Lynch: Tomos Edwards, Merrill Lynch, 020 7995 2763

About Trucost:

• Trucost is an environmental research company, which helps companies and investors understand the environmental impacts of business activities in financial terms.
• Trucost provides data on 4,000+ companies across the world’s major investible indices (including MSCI World Developed, MSCI Europe, FTSE All Share and subsets, Russell 1000, S&P 500, Nikkei 225, ASX 200 and MSCI Asia ex-Japan).
• Trucost recently published research showing UK investment funds display wide variations in their carbon footprint, the most carbon intensive having a footprint almost ten times that of the least carbon intensive.
• As well as measuring the environmental impact of individual companies, Trucost has developed a way to ‘carbon optimise’ investment portfolios replicating the returns of the original but with a much lower carbon footprint.
• For more information visit: www.trucost.com

About Merrill Lynch:

Merrill Lynch Global Research has consistently achieved high rankings for its equity and fixed income research in numerous regional and global investor surveys, such as Institutional Investor, The Wall Street Journal, LatinFinance, Asiamoney, Euromoney, Bloomberg, Extel and Reuters.

Merrill Lynch is one of the world's leading wealth management, capital markets and advisory companies, with offices in 38 countries and territories and total client assets of approximately $1.7 trillion. As an investment bank, it is a leading global trader and underwriter of securities and derivatives across a broad range of asset classes and serves as a strategic advisor to corporations, governments, institutions and individuals worldwide. Merrill Lynch owns approximately half of BlackRock, one of the world's largest publicly traded investment management companies with more than $1 trillion in assets under management.

For more information on Merrill Lynch, please visit www.ml.com