by Rebecca Walker — May 26, 2010—Rather than waiting for regulatory conditions to solidify, leading companies are taking their cues from the market by investing in climate change initiatives, reporting on their performance and leaning on their supply chains to reduce emissions.
Those are some of the dominant themes of a new survey from Ernst & Young on C-suite attitudes toward climate change. The report, Action Amid Uncertainty: The business response to climate change, probed 300 global executives from corporations with annual revenue of $1 billion or more on how they are responding climate challenges.
The survey found that 70 percent of these executives from 16 countries and 18 industry sectors intend to increase investment in climate change initiatives such as energy efficiency and product development over the next two years. For nearly half of those in the survey, the expenditure will equal between 0.5 percent to more than 5 percent of their revenue.
Ernst & Young conducted the survey to gain an understanding of how executives view the current environment around climate change and learn about the overall climate change frameworks in place at their companies. It discovered five factors driving climate change initiatives that respondents rated higher in importance than regulation: energy reduction, changing consumer demands, the development of new products or services, competitive threats, and stakeholder expectations.
Highlighting the need for reporting and transparency among companies, although 40 percent of those in the survey called themselves industry leaders for their climate change performance, only 28 percent admitted they benchmark their performance against their peers.
The survey also found that 30 percent of companies have an individual managing their climate change initiatives full-time, and climate change governance rests with C-suite executives or board members for more than 90 percent of respondents.
For more information, see the Ernst & Young Web site.
