The Carbon Disclosure Project 2009, Asia ex-Japan Report, authored by the Association for Sustainable & Responsible Investment in Asia (ASrIA), was released at a well-attended launch event hosted by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, at their offices in Hong Kong. 
 
Wai-Shin Chan, Executive Director of ASrIA and Joe Osha, Managing Director, Head of Asia Research, Bank of America Merrill Lynch opened the event.  Joe Osha noted that “CDP plays an important role in facilitating discussions between corporations, governments and NGO’s in the search for sustainable and strategic solutions.  The CDP results are material to investors and the greater and more sophisticated the responses, the better the information flow to investors.”

Sue Howells, Head of Global Operations for the Carbon Disclosure Project and David St. Maur Sheil of ASrIA provided reviews of the findings from the Global 500 and the Asia ex-Japan reports. 

It was noted that the number of reporting companies had grown significantly, to 127 this year, and the quality and materiality of responses has continued to improve. Of particular note, a significantly wider range of operation data and metrics were provided than previous years and the responses provide a wide range of valuable information and insights for investors.  This was a year of consolidation for many of the veteran companies.  An increasing number of companies have set benchmarks and targets, are working with their operational data and exploring strategic initiatives.  The outstandingly strong response from the Information technology sector highlighted a key theme, which is the extent to which supply chain factors have been a key driver for engagement with climate change related issues by Asian companies. 

Valuable presentations were also made by Dr Jeanne Ng, Director - Group Environmental Affairs, CLP and Robert Gibson, Director Sustainable Development; John Swire & Sons (HK) Ltd.  Both Jeanne and Robert emphasized the value that their companies found in engaging with the CDP process.  Jeanne noted that once a company engaged with the CDP it became a valuable internal driver for continual improvement to meet the targets set in the company response, whilst Robert Gibson noted that the CDP process also provided a valuable standard format for climate change reporting by Swire’s diverse business units, and that Swire now had over twenty of its companies responding internally to the questionnaire.

During the second half of the event a launch was held for the Copenhagen Communiqué, which over 600 companies have signed setting out the business case for an ambitious, robust, effective and equitable UN climate framework and offers a progressive global consensus on the shape of an agreement. See www.copenhagencommunique.com