Carbon Financials Initiative expands to UK
In order for financial firms to properly take climate change risks and opportunities into account they need comparable, standardised data. Measuring carbon emissions would be a simple, effective and material place to start monitoring the climate impact of the businesses financial firms invest in. Until such time as every counterparty that banks lend to start to prepare their own carbon disclosures, it’s necessary to produce a range of estimates.
The Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF) has been working towards standardised carbon accounting for the financial sector since 2015. PCAF is an industry led-partnership that develops the open-access, free-of-charge Global Carbon Accounting Standard, designed to help the financial industry to estimate and account for the greenhouse emissions associated with loans and investments.
The recently launched PCAF UK coalition will join PCAF’s existing 77 financial institutions to look at financed emissions in a UK context, sharing best practices, working on data quality improvements and performing research on further method development.
Here at XBRL International we believe structured, standardised carbon disclosures reported in XBRL format are a crucial next step in sustainability reporting. Creating effective standards of measurement is a great first step towards a future of widespread, XBRL tagged carbon emissions disclosures.
Read more about PCAF here.
