The 9th edition of the Responsible Business Rankings was launched at the ET Global Sustainability Alliance Congerence on 28thSeptember. The study focuses on looking at Climate Change Readiness disclosures of top Indian companies. The research and rankings started in 2014 as a collaboration between Futurescape, IIM Udaipur and Economic Times with a focus on sustainability and social responsibility. The focus this year is to look at how companies are working towards: (a) reducing their own emissions; (b) reducing emissions within the supply chain; (c) integrating climate actions into business strategy; and (d) influencing climate action in other stakeholders
The study shows that 75% of the top companies report on direct emission (Scope 1 and Scope 2). Scope 3 disclosures, which cover indirect emissions that occur in the value chain of the reporting company, seem to be an area of concern for everyone as only 48% of companies focus on these. The top 20 companies in our study reported an average increase of 3% in combined Scope 1 & 2 emissions in FY2021-22 over the previous year. However, the GHG intensity has dropped by an average of 5.5% over the same period.
While these trends are useful in understanding how companies are readying themselves to act on climate crisis the study uses a range of parameters to assess the overall measure of a company’s climate readiness and found that top Indian Companies are only around 50% climate ready. The biggest gap seen across organizations is that companies don’t extend their decarbonization frameworks as part of their value chains. Further, companies aren’t investing sufficiently in green products and services. The ones that are focused on innovation are looking at new materials, new processes and green packaging to achieve their decarbonization targets.