The Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD)

Greenstone is a formal supporter of The Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and enables its clients to align their reporting with the TCFD recommendations through its software solutions and support services.

What is TCFD?

The Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) was established by the Financial Stability Board (FSB) in 2015 in order to review how the financial sector could take account of climate-related issues.

The TCFD seeks to develop recommendations for voluntary climate-related financial disclosures that are consistent, comparable, reliable, clear, and efficient, and provide decision-useful information to lenders, insurers, and investors.

TCFD Key Features

1. Widely applicable
2. Flexibility in the location of disclosure
3. Alignment with existing reporting frameworks
4. Organisation orientated
5. Focus on risks, opportunities and resilience

TCFD Recommended Disclosures

• Disclosure of governance relating to climate-related risks and opportunities.

1. Describe the board’s oversight of climate-related risks and opportunities.
2. Describe management’s role in assessing and managing climate-related risks and opportunities.

• Disclosure of actual and potential impacts of climate-related risks and opportunities on the organisation’s businesses, strategy, and financial planning.

1. Describe the climate-related risks and opportunities the organisation has identified over the short, medium, and long term.
2. Describe the impact of climate-related risks and opportunities on the organisation’s businesses, strategy, and financial planning.
3. Describe the resilience of the organisation’s strategy, taking into consideration different climate-related scenarios, including a 2°C or lower scenario.

• Disclose how the organisation identifies, assesses, and manages climate-related risks.

1. Describe the organisation’s processes for identifying and assessing climate-related risks.
2. Describe the organisation’s processes for managing climate-related risks.
3. Describe how processes for identifying, assessing, and managing climate-related risks are integrated into the organisation’s overall risk management.

• Disclosure of metrics and targets used by the organisation to assess and manage climate-related risks and opportunities.

1. Disclose the metrics used by the organisation to assess climate-related risks and opportunities in line with its strategy and risk management process.
2. Disclose Scope 1, Scope 2, and, if appropriate, Scope 3 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and the related risks.
3. Describe the targets used by the organisation to manage climate-related risks and opportunities and performance against targets.

For more information on these disclosures, please visit the TCFD website. 

Aligning TCFD with other frameworks

Through Greenstone’s award-winning Frameworks module, organisations can meet the reporting requirements of global sustainability reporting frameworks. These include GRI Standards, CDP, UNGC, TCFD, SDGs and many leading financial exchange reporting schemes around the world including SGX, JSE SI, DJSI and FTSE4Good.

You can define unique question sets from these frameworks based on their relevance and materiality to your organisation. Data and supporting information is then collected across the organisation before being consolidated into internal and external reporting templates as required. 

Greenstone’s Frameworks module, part of its Enterprise sustainability software, has a TCFD tool to enable users to monitor Management Information and collect, analyse and report site-level climate change risks and opportunities. It also has award-winning framework mapping functions to be able to link SASB and TCFD content to other industry or company-specific frameworks (e.g. SDGs, UNGC, UNPRI).

The Frameworks was recognised by the Business Intelligence Group and named ‘Sustainability Product of the Year’ in the 2019 Sustainability Awards program.

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