On December 18th, the Ontario Securities Commission issued Notice 51-717 Corporate Governance and Environmental Disclosure and published their report to the Minister of Finance on the recommendation of their corporate sustainability reporting initiative. As part of this review CCLN provide the OSC with a significant submission on carbon disclosure rates amoung Canadian issuers, which had the support of the investor group Ceres, the British Columbia Investment Management Corporation and the Canadian Climate Action Network. (The submission and press release from Ceres can be viewed here: http://www.ceres.org/Page.aspx?pid=1138)
In their report to the Minister of Finance, the OSC cited the CCLN’s submission and its results:
In their submission to the OSC, the signatories included a survey of disclosure in 2008 annual reports by
35 reporting issuers in Ontario in nine industry sectors with market capitalization of at least CDN $1 billion.
The survey found that the disclosure contained poor or limited descriptions of climate change risks, if the
issue was discussed at all. The signatories recommended that the OSC work with the CSA to provide
guidance to issuers on how to disclose climate change risks within the context of existing reporting
obligations. The signatories also encouraged the OSC to improve corporate governance disclosure of how
issuers are addressing their climate change risk at board and management levels.
More importantly however, in their recommendations to the Minister, the OSC vowed to follow our recommendations and issue guidance for environmental disclosures by the fall of 2010. They have also accepted CCLN’s recommendation to work with the Canadian Securities Administrators and will invite them to participate in the development of the guidance. This will help ensure that guidance is applicable across Canada and will raise the quantity and quality of climate change risk assessements and disclosure nationally.
The CCLN will continue to work with Ceres and investor allies on lobbying the OSC to ensure that the guidance to investors is rigorous and meets the standards set by the Global Framework for Climate Risk Disclosure.
