In the United States, the stock market regulator is taking new measures to force companies to better communicate on their carbon footprint. In his view, the ecological risk must be shared transparently with investors.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), American policeman of the stock market sector, has just announced new obligations for listed companies. They will now have to transparently communicate the efforts they are making to limit their ecological footprint and offer investors a clearer view of the pollution they cause. The new rules will soon be published on the Federal Register and a final version of the legislation is expected in the coming months. Once approved, companies that do not comply with these new obligations may be sanctioned.
Informational equity
For the chairman of the SEC, Gary Gensler, investors must always be informed of the potential risks they take by investing in a particular company. This is the reason why listed companies must publish their financial results every quarter, or transmit extremely complete files for each strategic operation. Today, the SEC considers the ecological impact of economic activities to be a risk of which investors must be fully informed.
Also according to Gary Gensler, it was becoming urgent to change the legislation in this direction, while the fairness of information on the ecological risk was not respected. Indeed, some listed companies make the environment a major subject of communication with the public and investors, while others completely exclude this aspect. These new rules will require, for example, all companies present on the American financial markets to communicate the greenhouse gas emissions directly linked to their activities, but also those linked to their energy expenditure, their supply chains or even the shipping their products to customers.
The entry into force of these new ecological evaluation standards will be gradual, in stages, over the next four years. And some very sophisticated calculations will be reserved for larger companies. These new measures obviously do not only make people happy, some are firmly opposed to them, believing that the SEC is stepping out of its role by imposing them, that it is far too complex to quantify the ecological impact of a company in a relevant way. , or that there are less punitive means of informing about the environmental consequences of economic activities.