A record 722 investors worth $87 trillion have called for businesses to report their greenhouse gas emissions and climate change plans, according to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP).
The CDP provides a platform for companies to uniformly report their carbon emissions and the actions they will take to mitigate them.
To launch its 2013 round of reporting it asked investors to sign up to its program, with a record high number of signatories and a larger geographic spread taking the plunge.
New members from Brazil and Taiwan joined the call for more than 5000 businesses to submit their data to the CDP.
A growing number of stock exchanges are making the reporting CDP encourages mandatory. (Flickr/NYCmarines)
“Since pioneering a system for natural capital disclosure a little over ten years ago, the number of investor signatories to CDP programs has grown more than twentyfold and growth in the number of companies using the CDP system has nearly matched this rate,” said Paul Simpson, CDP’s chief executive officer.
“This is testament to the economic relevance of environmental data to investment decisions,” he added.
Businesses are in some respects leading climate action where there are long term advantages to doing so.
Peter Boyd of Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room campaign recently told RTCC that the private sector was essential to achieving the goal of limiting warming to below 2°C.
Companies have until May 30 to report their emissions and related programs to the CDP. The deadline for its forestry and water projects is June 27.
In April, all companies listed on the London Stock Exchange will be required to submit annual sustainability reports in order to continue trading.
It will be one of the first mainstream exchanges in the world to make reporting mandatory as part of UN’s Sustainable Stock Exchanges Initiative along with others from Johannesburg, Istanbul and Mumbai.