KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 4 — The wider environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues arising from climate change are a concern to Malaysia’s economic resilience, recovery and sustainability agenda, which was a focal point in the recently tabled Budget 2021, said Ernst & Young (EY) Advisory Services Sdn Bhd.
Climate Change and Sustainability Services director Arina Kok said there is significant scope for Malaysia’s public listed companies (PLCs) to leverage climate risk assessment to build organisational resilience and help create long-term value in today’s challenging times.
“As communities and economies struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic and with climate change trends increasingly apparent across regions, a wait-and-see approach could heighten the risk of not developing comprehensive and robust strategies to strengthen business resilience,” she said in a statement today.
The statement comes after the published findings of the inaugural EY Climate Risk Disclosure Barometer (CRDB) 2020 Malaysia, as Malaysia’s top 100 PLCs lack comprehensive climate risk disclosures, scoring only 34 per cent for coverage of climate change-related risks and 12 per cent for quality of the disclosures.
The scores were higher for coverage of metrics and targets at 45 per cent, followed by risk management at 41 per cent.
According to the survey, coverage of governance and strategy was lower at 22 per cent and 24 per cent, respectively.
The findings were based on the analyses of reporting disclosures by the PLCs, benchmarked against the global Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) recommendations in four areas — governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets. – BERNAMA