NEW YORK, NY, TUESDAY, MARCH 22ND, 2022 - The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, a coalition of over 300 faith- and values-based institutional investors representing more than US$4 trillion in assets under management, strongly commends the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for issuing a thoughtful and nuanced proposal on mandatory climate risk disclosure yesterday that would provide critical information to investors on material risks to their portfolios.
“The SEC’s proposed climate disclosure rule will be critical in setting a floor to ensure that investors of all sizes will have access to data about corporate and portfolio-level climate risk, vital to making investment decisions as the economy pivots to a clean energy future,” said Christina Herman, Program Director for Climate and Environmental Justice at ICCR. “Investors have made it very clear that climate risks are material, and after two decades of relying on voluntary reporting regimes to assess risks stemming from climate change, the consistency and oversight rigor offered by the rule is welcome. We are grateful that the SEC is acting to require this standardized and comparable climate disclosure, which will enable more efficient use of time and resources by investors, and is long overdue.”
The proposed rule includes elements of climate disclosure that are of critical importance to investors, and ICCR and its members will be submitting comments to the SEC on many aspects of the rule in the coming weeks. The disclosure mandated by the SEC includes many elements that investors have been requesting for years: companies’ climate-related risk management, strategy, and governance; the impact of climate change on companies’ financial statements; the details and assumptions backing public climate commitments; and finally, greenhouse gas emissions reporting for Scopes 1 and 2 for all companies, and Scope 3, where material (or for companies that have set a GHG emissions target or goal that includes Scope 3 emissions), except for the smallest companies. Our hope is that the final rule would be strengthened in several regards, including on matters of assurance of the disclosure, as well as on community-level corporate climate impacts and environmental justice metrics that investors increasingly seek. We look forward to examining the rule in greater detail and to the opportunity to share our perspective.
About the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR)
Celebrating its 51st year, ICCR is the pioneer coalition of shareholder advocates who view the management of their investments as a catalyst for social change. Its 300-member organizations comprise faith communities, socially responsible asset managers, unions, pensions, NGOs, and other socially responsible investors with combined assets of over $4 trillion. ICCR members engage hundreds of corporations annually in an effort to foster greater corporate accountability. Visit our website www.iccr.org and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
###