Mandatory carbon reporting: the facts

02 August 2012

Mandatory carbon reporting will make the UK the first country in the world to make it compulsory for listed companies to include emissions data for their entire organisation in their annual reports says Tim Clapham, marketing director at Planon Software. This level of detail will enable investors to see which companies are efficiently managing the long-term costs of greenhouse gas emissions – and which are not.

The new regulation, set to be introduced in April 2013, is an initial pilot scheme in order for ministers to decide whether to extend these rules to cover all large companies from 2016. If successful, the legislation has the potential to save four million tonnes of CO2 emissions by 2021.

Planon estimates that, at present, only a small percentage of the 1,850 listed companies affected are ready for this new regulation – which means that a significant number of listed companies in the UK could be facing a race against time to become compliant with these new regulations.

We believe that businesses should be looking at taking action now to ensure that they are not left behind when investors start using greenhouse emissions as a consideration for future investments. For a start, companies can (and should) be employing strategies and software solutions that have the capability to capture utilities data effectively, not only as a way of developing a more complete understanding of their energy usage, but also to make their reporting on emissions less arduous and more accurate.