The REP Wrap: UK proposes its own CS3D, US agency to clamp down on carbon offsets
Your weekly summary of corporate sustainability news.
A UK equivalent to the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive has gone through its first reading in the House of Lords this week. If successful, the proposed Bill would mirror efforts in the EU, France and Denmark to hold companies accountable for sustainability breaches within their supply chains. Specifically, it seeks to “place a duty on commercial organisations and public authorities to prevent human rights and environmental harms, including an obligation to conduct and publish human rights and environmental due diligence assessments on their own operations, subsidiaries and value chains; to make provision for civil liability, penalties, and a criminal offence for failures to comply with the duty; and for connected purposes.”
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is setting up a taskforce to help it enforce against fraud in the carbon offsetting space. Speaking on social media, CFTC Commissioner Kristin Johnson said the independent agency must “lead in issuing advisories and guidance, and begin developing rules that introduce transparency and market structure reforms in crypto and environmental commodities markets”. The Environmental Commodities Fraud Taskforce will inform what Johnson described as “important regulatory reforms” over coming months.
GRI and EFRAG have published an ‘index’ explaining how their respective sustainability disclosure standards stack up against each other. GRI is responsible for some of the world’s most popular voluntary standards, while EFRAG oversees those underpinning the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. The pair have worked together for three years, and this week committed to continue collaborating on technical standards. “Entities reporting under ESRS will be deemed reporting ‘with reference’ to the GRI standards and existing GRI reporters will be able to leverage their current reporting efforts to prepare their ESRS “Sustainability statement”,” they said in a statement. EFRAG is expected to sign off on the index at its December meeting, they added.
A study of 1,641 US-based listed firms has concluded that those with large market capitalisations “displayed a clear and statistically significant positive relationship with diverse management”. In what it describes as one of the first empirical analyses of the impact of corporate diversity on financial performance, advocacy group As You Sow assessed the firms between 2016 and 2022, based on information released by the US Department of Labour earlier this year.
Bloomberg has launched a tool that promises to help investors work out “the potential impact of a company’s business on any of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals”. The product maps some 500 sectorial activities to 30 types of impact – both positive and negative – for 50,000 listed firms.
The UK’s Green Finance Institute (CFI) wants to develop an industry for ‘property-linked finance’, based on the PACE model in the US. The government-backed body said it would work to convene companies, financial institutions, national lawmakers and local authorities to build the industry, adding that it had the potential to be rolled out across Europe. GFI has also published a report on how to unlock financing for low-carbon trucks and heavy goods vehicles.