Australian shareholders should be told of climate risk to profits, says thinktank

Australian companies need to start developing sophisticated scenario-based analyses of climate risks, and incorporating them into their business outlooks so shareholders know how climate change will affect profitability, a thinktank has said.

Businesses in Australia have been urged to incorporate climate
 risks into their outlooks so shareholders can see the potential impacts.

However, the Centre for Policy Development (CPD) said companies needed to do so in a standardised way, so investors and regulators were able to easily understand economy-wide risks to whole industries.

The progressive thinktank urged Australia’s biggest businesses to use the Paris climate agreement as the centrepiece for their scenario planning, saying it provided a credible, long-term anchor for policies that limit global warming to well below 2C.

Read the story on The Guardian by Gareth Hutchens - “Australian shareholders should be told of climate risk to profits, says thinktank."

The scientific understatement of climate risks

Human-induced climate change is an existential risk to human civilisation, yet much climate research understates climate risks and provides conservative projections. Reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that are crucial to climate policymaking and informing public narrative are characterised by scientific reticence, paying limited attention to lower-probability, high-risk events that are becoming increasingly likely.  

This latest Breakthrough report argues for an urgent risk reframing of climate research and the IPCC reports.

Read the Breakthrough story and download the report - “The scientific understatement of climate risks."