Brussels mulls new guidelines for company reporting on climate info
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(BRUSSELS) - As part of its Sustainable Finance Action Plan, the EU Commission launched Thursday a consultation with the objective to finalise new guidelines for company reporting on climate-related information.
The consultation puts forward a number of ways to assess how climate change can impact the financial performance of companies, as well as how companies can have positive and negative impacts on the climate.
It builds on the report published in January by the Technical Expert Group on Sustainable Finance, and stakeholders' responses to the call for feedback on that report.
"Company reporting of climate information has improved in recent years, and some European companies are world leaders in this field," said Valdis Dombrovskis, Vice-President responsible for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union: "But the scale and urgency of the climate crisis means that we rapidly need more companies to disclose more comprehensive and more comparable information."
"The success of the Commission's Sustainable Finance Action depends amongst other things on companies being more transparent about their impact on the climate and on the business risks and opportunities that climate change creates."
Mr Dombrovskis urged companies and other organisations to respond to the consultation, "to help us make these guidelines as impactful as possible."
Once finalised, the new guidelines on climate reporting will supplement the existing guidelines on non-financial reporting that the Commission published in 2017.
They are intended for use by companies that fall under the scope of the Non-Financial Reporting Directive, which means large listed companies, banks and insurance companies, with more than 500 employees.
The Commission intends to publish the final version of the guidelines by the end of June.
Stakeholders are invited to respond to the consultation at the link below
Targeted consultation on the update of the non-binding guidelines on non-financial reporting