The Australian corporate regulator has warned of a substantial decline in the number of businesses including climate impact statements in their company reports.
‘Worrying’: Companies’ reporting of climate risks goes ‘backwards’
By Ruth Williams
20 September 2018 — 4:11pmThe number of companies providing information about climate change and its risks in their annual reports has fallen dramatically since 2011, and information that is provided is often “fragmented” and of limited use to investors, the corporate regulator has found.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) examined the 2017 annual reports of 60 companies in the ASX300, of which just 17 per cent disclosed climate change as a “material risk”. Outside the top 200 companies, climate risk disclosure was “very limited”.
ASIC then examined 15,000 ASX-listed company annual reports dating back six years and found that the proportion containing climate risk and climate-change-related content had dropped from 22 per cent in 2011 to 14 per cent – probably due to the existence and then repeal of the Gillard-era emissions trading scheme legislation.…
I suspect part of the problem might be the difficulty of quantifying the impact of climate change, based on seriously poor quality climate predictions.