November 2018 | Sarah Barker

To assist boards and their committees navigate the step-change in corporate governance and disclosure expectations regarding the impacts of climate change on their business, the Commonwealth Climate and Law Initiative has collaborated with leading governance advisors to develop The Climate Risk Reporting Journey: A Corporate Governance Primer. The primer serves as an actionable framework on how to incorporate climate change risks and opportunities into corporate governance practice. Recognising the centrality of financial reporting as the primary source of assurance to shareholders, the primer proposes key questions relevant to the assurance of a corporation’s reporting on climate-related financial issues and to the robust processes of governance and oversight on which those disclosures must be based. Although the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures are voluntary and provide a framework for reporting rather than board governance per se, they are emerging as the key benchmark against which to assess a company’s strategic approach to climate change. The primer seeks to place each query in context by indicating the category of the TCFD recommendations to which they relate: governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets.