Companies face growing pressure to disclose their climate change risks

How can you tell if climate change represents a big financial risk for a business or your investments? For now, Wall Street's top regulator doesn't offer much help. That's because there are no set rules for what companies must disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission about their potential financial exposure to global warming.

As a step toward filling that void, the SEC this spring asked for feedback on what such requirements should entail. The regulator is how sifting through thousands of comments from companies, lobbyists, legal experts, banks, investors and others. "The current state of climate change disclosure does not meet our needs," a group representing $2.7 trillion in assets led by the California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS), various state funds, state treasurers and nonprofits wrote detailing their requests. They want, among other things, companies to disclose greenhouse gas emissions in a way that make it easy to compare businesses.