British companies obliged to publish GHG figures

Britain’s companies are to become the first in the world forced to publish full details of the greenhouse gasses they produce. Government estimates assume this major step towards a Green Economy will help saving up to 4 million tonnes of CO2. The foundation of this milestone in climate policy had been laid by adelphi’s cost-benefit analysis.

From April 2013 on it will be mandatory for enterprises in the UK to reveal details of their greenhouse gas emissions. “This is a positive step in the right direction,” says Anthony Field of the WWF UK who had strongly campaigned for this success. The decision now marks an end to a one-and-a-half-year dispute, and the outcome could have been quite different. An analysis prepared by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) a year ago had shown that the costs would have predominated the overall economic benefit.

adelphi was then asked by the WWF UK to review the results and proved that companies will indeed gain huge benefits by having a closer eye on their emissions, and thus tipped the scales. Contrary to Defra’s report it demonstrated that enterprises could save significant amounts of energy and fuel only by regularly collecting the related data. This will also give companies a massive competitive edge since more and more customers’ and investors’ decisions are based on the question how energy efficiently enterprises and their products are. The overall economic benefit could sum up to two billion British Pounds over the next decade if all 24.000 major companies joined in.

The recent decision for mandatory GHG reporting will be only applicable to the 1,600 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange. The policy will be reviewed in 2015, and other large companies might be asked to follow. The decision could set an example for other European countries such as Germany.

Only recently adelphi had published a study on the comparability of sustainability reports of the 30 largest companies listed in the German Stock Exchange. It revealed that only four had given a truly extensive and transparent account of their climate footprint. The majority, on the other hand, had left the public in the dark as to how the figures had been determined.

For further information:
www.adelphi.de/de/news/d…
www.adelphi.de/de/publik…
www.defra.gov.uk/consult…
www.wwf.org.uk/what_we_d…