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Germany's Family-Owned Companies Lag in CO2 Emissions Reporting
2010-10-21 12:30:00.0 GMT
By Jeremy van Loon
Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Germany's family-owned companies
trail those traded on the nation's stock markets in reporting
carbon emissions, said Caspar von Blomberg, who heads the German
chapter of the Carbon Disclosure Project.
"Non-listed companies are a big opportunity," von
Blomberg said in an interview. "Many of Germany's large carbon
emitters are family-owned and many want to know how to better
benchmark their listed competitors."
Some of Germany's largest companies, including Robert Bosch
GmbH and Franz Haniel & Cie GmbH, are not listed on indexes such
as the DAX, whose members include Siemens AG and Volkswagen AG.
Closely-held companies aren't required to publish quarterly
financial reports and therefore also don't provide data on
environmental criteria such as CO2 output, von Blomberg said.
This year, 20 percent more companies in Europe's largest
economy are providing investors with details on their carbon
emissions, including 29 of 30 DAX index members, the Carbon
Disclosure Project said today. Germany has about 1,000 listed
companies, compared with 4,000 in the U.K., said von Blomberg.
The German economy is 50 percent larger than the U.K.'s.
The number of U.K.-based companies implementing policies on
carbon-dioxide reduction has also increased, a study yesterday
by the Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc showed. Some 73 percent
of U.K.-based companies with annual revenues of more than 25
million pounds ($35 million) are working toward reducing CO2
emissions, an increase of 50 percent compared with 2008, the RBS
study said.
CO2 emissions in Germany declined 6.5 percent last year,
mainly because of the economic crisis, the Carbon Disclosure
Project said. Emissions were still higher than CO2 output in
2007, the year before the crisis.
The Carbon Disclosure Project represents more than 500
institutional investors and seeks to include carbon pollution
data into corporate financial accounting.
For Related News and Information:
Renewable energy home page: RENE <GO>
Top environment news: GREEN <GO>
Alternative-energy stories: NI ALTNRG <GO>
--Editors: Baldave Singh,
To contact the reporters on this story:
Jeremy van Loon in Berlin at +49-30-70010-6231 or
jvanloon@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Reed Landberg at +44-20-7330-7862 or
landberg@bloomberg.net
