BSE launches carbon index

Premier bourse BSE, in collaboration with the UK government, today launched BSE Carbonex, the first-of-its-kind index in India or any emerging market that would track the performance of companies in terms of their commitment to reduce emission of green house gases.

The index with a base date of September 30, 2010 opened today at 953.83 and closed at 959.50.

"The launching of India's own carbon index is a fine example of how sharing expertise from London's experience can have mutual benefits for both the UK and Indian markets. The BSE CARBONEX index should help Indian companies reach their commitments on low carbon growth," Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said after launching the index here.

The managing director and chief executive of the Bombay Stock Exchange Ashishkumar Chauhan said that it has been found the world over that the companies achieving leadership in mitigating climate change risk, generate superior stock performance.

He said the BSE CARBONEX would use risk-tilted version of BSE-100 index and weights of the constituents would be adjusted to reflect their climate risk relative to industry peers.

The British High Commission in India through the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office's Prosperity Fund supported the development phase of the index while ENDS Carbon, a specialist in Environment, Social and Governance ratings provided expertise in assessing the companies with data sourced from the Carbon Disclosure Project.

The exchange said that the new index is launched to create a benchmark and increase the awareness about the risks posed by the climate change.

The index will enable investors to track performance of the companies that are part of the BSE-100 Index regarding their commitment to greenhouse gases emissions reductions.

About the computation of the index, it said that the constituents of the BSE Carbonex are over or under-weighted compared to the benchmark based on their performance in the assessment process.

In every industry, companies that achieve the strongest assessment scores are favoured at the expense of those achieving poor results.

The top 10 constituents in BSE Carbonex are ITC Ltd having 7.11% market capitalisation followed by Reliance Industries (6.48% market capitalisation), ICICI Bank (5.54%), HDFC Bank (5.48%), HDFC Ltd (5.30%), Infosys (5.27%), L&T (4.21%), TCS (3.49%), Hindustan Unilever (2.73%) and ONGC (2.68%).

Meanwhile, the carbon credit market worldwide is now reported to be worth about $188 billion, one of the only markets that continued to increase during the recent years of worldwide recession.