“The combination of the weight of scientific evidence and the dynamics of the financial system suggest that, in the fullness of time, climate change will threaten financial resilience and longer-term prosperity. While there is still time to act, the window of opportunity is finite and shrinking.” — Mark Carney, speaking at Lloyd’s of London in September 2015

Earlier this month saw the inaugural meeting in London of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), an industry-led group which brings together global best practice climate disclosure under the chairmanship of Michael Bloomberg. Launched by Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England and Head of the Financial Stability Board at last year’s Paris climate change summit, the task force plans to produce a series of guidelines that companies can follow to create better, more standardized information on their exposure to climate change for investors, credit rating agencies, insurers, and other users of financial statements. “From an investment point of view, if you can measure it, you can then manage it,” as Bloomberg said in a recent interview with the FT.

There’s a real buzz around the world of climate change and environmental information at the moment driven by recent high profile global events. COP21 in Paris in December achieved an unprecedented agreement on limiting global warming, closely followed in January at the World Economic Forum annual gathering in the mountain resort of Davos when the global corporate leaders who will head the TCFD were announced. An important milestone in the global shift towards better and more comprehensive nonfinancial reporting, the task force can build on a great deal of work already achieved in this area by a number of specialist NGOs, including the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB), an international consortium of businesses and environmental NGO’s originally launched at the Davos WEF meeting in 2007. It was created in response to demand for and in anticipation of growing mainstream reporting of climate and environmental information.

“CDSB is committed to advancing and aligning the global mainstream corporate reporting model to equate natural capital with financial capital,” explained Jane Stevensen, Managing Director of CDSB, when I interviewed her for this Forbes column.

“It does this by offering companies a framework for reporting environmental information with the same rigor as financial information. In turn, this helps to provide investors with decision-useful environmental information via the mainstream corporate report, enhancing the efficient allocation of capital. Regulators also benefit from compliance-ready materials”.

Recognizing that information about natural capital and financial capital is equally essential for an understanding of corporate performance, CDSB’s work builds trust and transparency needed to foster resilient capital markets. Collectively, they aim to contribute to more sustainable economic, social and environmental systems.

“We were approached last year by the Bank of England to help provide advice and insight into how to manage this whole issue of getting climate-related information into mainstream financial reports and accounts,” said Stevensen. “CDSB was able to support the Bank of England team which fed into the Governor’s now famous ‘Breaking the Tragedy of the Horizon‘ speech at Lloyds of London, addressing climate change and financial stability. It was the first public call for a global task force to be created to address the lack of reliable climate change information across markets.”

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