Carbon emission details of only 7% Indian firms public

Indian companies seem to be shying away from making their carbon emission details public, according to a survey by a UK-based non-profit body. Only seven per cent of Indian firms give out complete and verified data about their carbon emissions, says London-headquartered Environmental Investment Organisation (EIO) in its study.

Among the BRICS countries, companies in Brazil and South Africa are more forthcoming in making their emission details public than in India, the study notes. About 31 per cent companies in South Africa do share complete and verified data about their emissions.

The EIO report covers 300 largest companies in the five emerging BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. It ranks them on their carbon intensity and the amount of emissions information declared.

As per the survey, South Africa-based precious metal producer, Gold Fields, topped a rankings index measuring the standard of public emissions reporting across the BRICS nations. The second place went to Santander Brazil. Vale and Itau Unibanco from the same Latin American nation and Indian firm Infrastructure Development Finance reported on six, five and four categories respectively.

The 1996-founded EIO’s latest global rankings aim to cover all corporate emissions, including Scope 3 emissions such as transport and other indirect sources.

In India, the top five companies in terms of making carbon disclosure are Infrastructure Development Finance, Larsen and Toubro, Bharat Petroleum, Reliance Industries and Tata Power.

According to L&T, which ranked second in India, “carbon ranking is a measure of an organisation’s transparency, and provides the investment community with a tool to appraise levels of disclosure”.

Indian firms which have been ranked as the lowest in carbon disclosures are Jaiprakash Associates, Grasim Industries, Asian Paints, Power Grid Corporation of India and NTPC. The percentage of companies reporting complete data is below 60 per cent, even in the countries with the highest degree of reporting carbon footprint.

The report pointed out that though the BRICS nations still had a long way to go even though they were making progress in terms of carbon emission reporting.

The degree of verification of data by an independent source is particularly low in Russia and China. Both countries show only three per cent of companies having emissions data verified.