World companies show big interest in climate, US firms lag

0 Comments | AFP, September, 2007

NEW YORK (AFP) — The world's corporate giants are increasingly focused on climate change and many see it as an opportunity for profit but US firms tend to view it as a risk to their bottom line, a new study has said.

The paper, released just ahead of Monday's UN summit on climate change, is the fifth annual report by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a not-for-profit organization that vets corporate response to global warming on behalf of institutional shareholders.

Quizzing a sample of members in the Financial Times 500 (FT500) index of the world's biggest corporations, CDP found that 80 percent of respondents saw climate change as presenting risks and opportunities to their business.

Of those who considered climate change to represent a commercial risk,...