What is the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD)
The TCFD was created in 2015 by the Financial Stability Board to develop consistent climate-related financial risk disclosures for use by companies, banks, and investors in providing information to stakeholders.
The TCFD produced recommendations in 2017 that outline a framework for reporting climate-related information. To date, this has been the leading guidance on climate reporting and has received widespread support globally. Multiple countries have made TCFD part of their regulatory framework in many jurisdictions, including the European Union, Singapore, Canada, Japan and South Africa. NZ and the UK are mandating in 2023 and 2025 respectively.
The TCFD recommendations incorporate four key themes: governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets. Under each theme, 11 disclosures are recommended.
Who is required to report?
Climate-related disclosures are mandatory for large, listed companies with a market capitalisation of more than $60 million; large-licensed insurers, registered banks, credit unions, building societies and managers of investment schemes with more than $1 billion in assets; and some Crown financial institutions (via letters of expectation) in NZ from 2023.
In the EU, large public interest entities with over 500 employees (listed companies, banks, and insurance companies) are now required to disclose under TCFD.
However, our mission is for all socially responsible companies to self report under TCFD so they can understand and manage their emissions, drive responsible change in this area, and this can also provide benchmarking for organisations and domestic and export markets.
How does Graph Research Labs help?
While companies have tools to measure their emissions, Industry Leaders are struggling with reporting these as they lack an accurate IT solution to aggregate emissions data into a standard data model and report them to stakeholders. Graph Research Labs provides this missing link.
Graph Research Labs have created an ESG Compliance and Reporting product using our proprietary data model and no-code declarative integration technology, to standardise and report a company's climate disclosure using the global Taskforce for Climate Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) standard.
Now Investors, Insurers and Companies can report and compare ESG performance across company portfolios and risk profiles, and access any-time reporting on this ESG data via our API and Reporting Portal.
How are we different from other reporting methods?
Current reporting methods use manual processes with many people manually assessing, collating data, and assembling reports into static PDF documents.
These manual steps can be inaccurate, costly, and makes extracting and comparing this data extremely complex and time consuming.
This leads to a huge risk that companies are either under or over reporting emissions, as there is no electronic data audit trail for comparison, making the disclosure process meaningless unless accurate auditable data is made available.
Our solution is totally electronic and data driven - all reporting dimensions are managed in our tool across Governance, Strategy, Risk and Emissions metrics, and assembled into a comprehensive data model ready for review and publishing by the organisations' compliance officer, then published via our API to any stakeholder or third party auditor.