November 9, 2023 California’s legislature just passed first-in-the nation climate disclosure laws: SB 253 and SB 261. SB 253 will require all companies doing business in California with at least US$1bn in revenue to report their Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, while SB 261 will compel those with more than US$500mn to publicly report […]
Role: Sustainable Investing
Why Accelerating Your Climate Strategy is a Competitive Advantage
More and more companies are developing corporate climate strategies and setting climate targets. For many organizations, risk is the central focus of these discussions as many wonder how to best mitigate the potential impacts of a changing climate and transitioning economy. Yet the upside of risk and uncertainty is opportunity. As climate-leading organizations are discovering, […]
Unpacking the European Union’s CSRD
June 28, 2023 The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) came into force on January 5, 2023. This wide-ranging legislation calls for the robust reporting of corporates’ climate-related financial risks and opportunities — and not just for companies in the European Union. Tens of thousands of companies in the US, UK, Canada, and elsewhere […]
How Does the CSRD Compare to the TCFD?
Businesses, investors, and governments are increasingly paying attention to companies’ climate and sustainability disclosures so they can better understand their financial risks and opportunities. To improve the quantity and quality of this information, global standard-setters and regulators are introducing climate and sustainability reporting frameworks and rules. The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and […]
What is the TNFD and how does it Fit into Climate Reporting?
Business risks and opportunities are shaped by all kinds of factors. A key development over the last decade or so has been the growing awareness of how environmental factors present financial risk to the global economy. This understanding informed the creation of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) in 2015 and the Task […]
The Investment Case for Climate Opportunities
While asset managers are in the business of growing their clients’ wealth, they’re also increasingly being asked to support climate goals. On paper these two objectives may appear at odds with one another, but in practice there’s plenty of overlap between them. Investing in climate opportunities can yield healthy financial returns and power the low-carbon […]
How herd behavior could imperil the low-carbon transition
Financial stability risks could arise if banks and investors all take the same route to decarbonize their portfolios “When the herd moves, it moves.” UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson used this phrase in his July 7 resignation speech to describe how political support flooded away from him in the wake of one too many scandals. It is also […]
Has the backlash against financed emissions begun?
Climate finance tastemakers are pushing for financial institutions to put real-economy emissions reductions at the heart of their net-zero strategies “Financed emissions” are no longer in vogue. Last year, they were all the rage. The Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), launched in April 2021, bounds its members together with a shared commitment to transition all the emissions […]
Lead with Climate: A Primer on ‘Climate, ESG, and the TCFD’
A more detailed version of this blog can be found here. Today’s investors have to understand how businesses are impacted by Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and climate-related risks and opportunities if they are to make wise decisions. While ESG and climate are often conflated by companies and external stakeholders alike, there are important distinctions […]
How to tackle net-zero target arbitrage
Many financial institutions have rolled out portfolio decarbonization goals. But the differences between them could be ‘gamed’ by carbon-intensive companies Net-zero target setting is all the rage in the financial sector. In recent weeks, four of the five largest Canadian banks have rolled out targets for select portfolios, while the laggard — Royal Bank of […]