Carbon Pricing Surges Across Major Multinationals
Putting a price on carbon emissions is going mainstream, according to new disclosures provided to CDP, which finds major multinationals including Allergan, Campbell’s Soup, Colgate-Palmolive, Stanley Black & Decker, Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Nestle, Microsoft and Nissan are among the 437 companies using carbon pricing to offset the costs and risks of their greenhouse gas emissions production.
CDP saw a tripling in the number of companies reporting that they use carbon pricing over last year (437 up from 150 in 2014), which the report says highlights the rise of big name brands across all industries putting a price on their climate risk.
An additional 583 companies say they plan to use an internal carbon price within the next two years, including Yahoo! and China’s power giant, CLP Holdings.
Together, more than 1,000 companies disclose to their key stakeholders that they currently price their carbon emissions — or intend to in the next two years — to try to meet their climate change risks.
In Asia, more than 10 times as many corporations disclosed they put an internal price on their carbon emissions this year — 93 in total up from eight in 2014 — pointing to the influence of China’s expected carbon trading scheme and the new carbofn market in South Korea. Among them are LG in TV and telecom, IT giant NEC, and Hitachi.
An internal price on carbon — where a price is applied to each metric ton of CO2 — is used as a planning tool by businesses across all industries and geographies, with the majority in Europe and strong representation from North America. Corporations chose to use the prices applied (ranging from $1 per metric ton to $357 per metric ton) as part of their efforts to mitigate risk from current or potential regulation; drive investments in clean energy purchases or other GHG reduction activities and to prioritize energy efficiency.