Abstract

In 2015, the G20 leaders requested that the Financial Stability Board (FSB) launched a Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD or Task Force). The Task Force chaired by Michael Bloomberg published its final recommendations in 2017 and requested that companies disclose their ‘climate risks’ – risks caused by climate change and linked to financial risks. In March 2018, the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB) in cooperation with the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) analysed ‘the disclosures from 1681 companies across 14 countries and 11 sectors to the CDP Questionnaire in 2017, which were made around the time of the launch of the final TCFD recommendations in June 2017’ (CDSB and CDP, 2018: 4). One recommendation by the TCFD was to report all scope 11 and scope 2 emissions; 9 out of 10 companies disclosed this information by 2017, with regards to scope 3 emissions 8 out of 10 disclosed at least one category. Despite this positive uptake, the report highlights several problems, for example:

New supra-national and jurisdictional regulations are improving corporate climate disclosures and their integration into internal governance and risk management processes. However, they are also potentially widening the global gap between leaders and laggards. The research shows how companies in countries covered by higher (and most regularly updated) amounts of regulation, such as the EU Non-Financial Reporting Directive, have the most oversight of climate-related matters (9 out of 10 companies have board oversight). Geographies with higher perceived risk of litigation linked to disclosure, such as North America, lag behind (where only 7 in 10 do). (CDSB and CDP, 2018: 5)

Both the TCFD and CDP have placed pressure on businesses to take climate change more seriously, but as Patenaude (2011) pointed out, business schools are lagging behind in responding to the risks of climate change, which were established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).