Many Canadian financial services organizations do well in disclosing their direct carbon emissions, according to the 2016 rankings from ET Index Research.
Manulife ranked 59th and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce ranked 62nd on the global list. Both companies disclose complete direct emissions – last year, Manulife directly emitted 1750,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide and CIBC emitted 69,000 tonnes.
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While financial institutions are more carbon-efficient than mining and oil companies, “it’s not quite as straightforward as you think,” says Sam Gill, chief executive officer of ET Index Research in London, England. “If you include the full supply chain emissions . . . then actually, financials still do pretty well but [are] not completely carbon-neutral,” he says.
CIBC also discloses its carbon emissions in 12 of the 15 categories for indirect carbon emissions, which include purchased goods and services, capital goods, business travel and employee commuting.
“They will typically be the emissions that account for 75 per cent to 80 per cent or more of a company’s total footprint, so clearly they’re absolutely key to understanding a company’s impact,” Gill says.
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The Canadian National Railway is the only Canadian organization to disclose its emissions for all 15 categories.
Pension funds moving away from investing in organizations with high carbon footprints is an important risk management issue, Gill notes. For plan members, “not only do they want a carbon secure world in the future so there’s still a planet to live on, but they’re also concerned obviously about the pension being able to pay out [its liabilities],” he says.
“If we see a very large and sudden devaluation in high carbon companies – we had the subprime crisis before; we have Mark Carney, one of your fellow countrymen, talking about how the next bubble could well be a carbon bubble – it doesn’t make sense for pension funds to be holding high-carbon assets. . . .”
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