Carbon Disclosure Project to assess world business CO2 footprint

AFP, 20 January 2008 - The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a consortium of 315 top institutional investors assessing industries about their CO2 emissions, announced Sunday a new partnership to extend its global initiative to companies and suppliers.
With members including Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Allianz and HSBC that manage assets of more than 41 trillion dollars, CDP since late 2007 has been working with some of the world's largest companies to help them assess greenhouse gas emissions through their supply chains, said its CEO Paul Dickinson.
"The Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration (SCLC) is a key step towards a unified business approach to climate change," he said on announcing the new partnership.
The SCLC sees the CDP teaming up with some of the largest purchasing global organizations, including Dell, Hewlett Packard, L'Oreal, PepsiCo, and Reckitt Benckiser.
They join Cadbury Schweppes, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Tesco, Imperial Tobacco, and Unilever, which signed on the third quarter of 2007.
Each SCLS member, in turn, has selected up to 50 suppliers to work with them and to respond to the CDP pilot information request in the first quarter of 2008.
The CDP information request gathers detailed information on companies' supply chains. It encourages suppliers to report carbon footprints and climate change-relevant information, such as greenhouse gas emissions data, emissions reduction targets and climate change strategy, the CDP said in a statement.
"By bringing together the purchasing authority of some of the largest companies in the world, CDP will encourage suppliers to measure and manage their greenhouse gas emissions," Dickinson said.
"This will enable large companies to work towards managing their total carbon footprint, as the first step to reducing the total carbon footprint is to measure its size."
The SCLC project will be rolled out in May 2008, and CDP is inviting more companies to join it.
The CDP was created five years ago and it gathers information on a voluntary basis that is not submitted to independent scrutiny.
More than 20 percent of the world's 500 largest companies refuse to provide information about their greenhouse gas emissions, environmental groups said.
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