Klimasensitivität von Jahresabschlüssen

Auswirkungen klimabezogene Faktoren auf die finanzielle Rechnungslegung von Unternehmen

Businesses play a central role in tackling the climate crisis. To reduce global heating in line with the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C target, technical, regulatory, financial and transparency measures are crucial. Today, however, climate change and climate-related policies are not reflected in most companies’ financial statements. This lack of climate sensitivity poses a risk to the green transformation and shows a shortcoming in current debates around sustainable finance.

There are several possible explanations for this shortcoming, but missing climate-related data can only partially explain the lack of attention. What is missing is a critical stance on climate sensitivity in financial accounting by auditors and supervisors. Plus, there are technical accounting issues such as lack of an established consideration by the markets.
The project on climate-sensitivity of financial accounting seeks to provide new lenses to overcome this climate myopia in today´s financial statements. It focuses on how climate-related matters impact and change financial performance of companies over time.

In these times of structural change towards a Paris-aligned world, a “true and fair” accounting will improve both transparency and viability of such a transition. Improved consistency in the requirements for financial statements could also effectively counteract greenwashing. Hence, our project focuses on the core of “sustainable finance”. It seeks to deploy accounting as a catalyst and aims for radically higher transparency within existing accounting standards and rules.

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