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All companies will soon have to account for climate risk. That was the clear message earlier this year from the final Recommendations Report of the G20’s Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) led by Mark Carney and Michael Bloomberg. It is increasingly the message of shareholders too. CCTNE’s Elizabeth Renski talked to Jane Stevensen about this emergence of a global standard that will facilitate disclosure and catalyse ‘green’ investment decisions.TCFD’s final Recommendations Report, which launched on 29 June 2017 has been well received by both business and governments. What is the key driver behind this success?I think, fundamentally, this is about the need for real climate competence at board level and mainstreaming climate reporting into financial accounts with board oversight and integrity. The TCFD’s core recommendation is that all companies should disclose climate-related financial information alongside their mainstream financial filings. The TCFD has tried to create some global standardisation to climate reporting, a move very much welcomed across the globe. More than 100 CEOs signed up to support the TCFD recommendations at launch, while BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has made it a top engagement priority to ask companies how they are assessing the risk that climate change poses to their operations. Moreover, the UK government has now endorsed the TCFD recommendations and France has called for them to be mandatory. A call we echo here at CDP. How can this be achieved? CDP and CDSB, for example, as part of the We Mean Business coalition, has launched a commitment for investors and companies to implement the TCFD recommendations within three years, which has initial endorsement from: Aviva plc, Enagás, Ferrovial, Iberdrola, Marks & Spencer, Philips Lighting, Sopra Steria Group, Wipro Ltd and WPP. So for all, the question has become not whether to manage climate risk, but how to do it.TCFD recommends that all companies and investors report against the same four core areas: governance, strategy, risk management and metrics and targets. How is this going to work in practice?The task at hand is to identify clear, measurable climate targets that can be easily integrated into a company’s mainstream reporting. There are several useful initiatives that can help companies find the right Key Performance Indicators for them. A good example of this is the science-based targets (SBTs) initiative. SBTs are a way to set meaningful carbon emissions reduction programmes that align with the Paris Agreement and therefore also ensure that your company’s efforts fit into the bigger picture of climate change mitigation. Putting a price on carbon is also becoming the new normal for major multinationals, with almost 1,400 companies embedding a carbon price into their business strategy. This represents an 8-fold increase (826 per cent) in take up in the last four years and includes more than 100 Fortune Global 500 companies. Last year more than 6,000 companies disclosed to CDP, leading to better transparency, benchmarking versus competitors and climate risk governance. What are the most common metrics companies use to form corporate environmental targets? Total Capex in low-carbon investment provides a relatively easy-to-quantify way to measure progress towards decarbonisation. Then we have the operational Interview with Jane Stevensen, Engagement Director to the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) at CDP and Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB)THE EMERGENCE OF A GLOBAL STANDARD“OUR MISSION IS TO DRIVE GLOBAL DISCLOSURE AT PACE AND SCALE”084 FINANCE AND INVESTMENT