The Future of Climate Change Transition Reporting
It’s time to shift our focus from a top-down scientific view of what needs to be done across sectors, to a bottom-up view of what individual businesses can actually do today to abate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
CPP Investments presents a proposal for projecting the capacity of companies to abate emissions.
We invite all interested parties to join us in refining this proposal and helping unlock its potential to become a decision-useful reporting standard that accelerates the greening of our economy.
We invest the CPP Fund today for current and future beneficiaries with an investment horizon of more than 75 years. Scientific evidence of the catastrophic consequences of climate change compels worldwide action to achieve a net-zero GHG economy. The factors that may affect the funding of the CPP include climate change along with economic, demographic and investment returns. The financial sustainability of the CPP is converging with the environmental sustainability of our investments. It follows that the performance of the portfolio we manage depends in part on how well it transitions with a climate-resilient economy.
We—as active market participants—have a vested interest in advancing large-scale progress to mitigate the threats and seize the opportunities of the global transition to net-zero emissions.
Our proposal, to collaboratively build and launch an open source, standardized transition capacity assessment framework, aims to contribute a powerful new instrument to the global decarbonization toolkit. The intelligence provided by this assessment would fill critical gaps, for businesses and for investors, about the current state of an organization’s carbon abatement capacity and how it is likely to evolve. For corporate boards and senior management, this would inform strategic decisions about how to increase a company’s competitiveness and its progress toward climate commitments. For investors, it will light up pathways for capital investment to achieve the greatest carbon reduction impact.
This is neither a simple undertaking nor a finished product. Rather, it is a framework—one that requires testing and input from those who stand to benefit from it most. We invite all interested parties to join us in refining this proposal and helping unlock its potential to become a decision-useful reporting standard that accelerates the greening of our economy.
For more information please contact:
Richard Manley
Managing Director, Head of Sustainable Investing
Global Leadership Team
rmanley@cppib.com
