In facing up to the challenges of climate change, businesses and investors have a major role to play. Incentives in the market determine whether investment goes towards carbon-intensive sectors or towards greener sectors, but transparent information is at the heart of these incentives. A seemingly profitable opportunity in the short-run can be recognised as a risky venture when information about its long-term sustainability is brought in.

While crucial for changing the incentives in the market, the current state of reported information is awash with overlapping, inconsistent and even contradictory standards. This increases the costs of reporting climate change-related information for businesses, and makes it needlessly difficult for investors and policymakers to build decisions upon.

One of the main tasks of the Climate Disclosure Standards Board is a response to these problems: the Consistency Project. This project is in the process of producing a single database that collects the various voluntary and mandatory environmental disclosure standards in the G20 countries. As businesses seek to provide the best information possible to investors, they are confronted with a bewildering array of mandatory regulations, suggested guidelines, and voluntary codes. Once complete, the Consistency Project will provide both an overview of the existing routes for environmental disclosure, as well as a basis for moving towards greater global consistency.

For businesses, the Consistency Project offers a simple means to compare, contrast, and collect information on how different jurisdictions are approaching the issue of environmental disclosure in financial statements. For instance, information on how different jurisdictions handle greenhouse gas measuring can be easily collected and presented. By simplifying portions of the reporting process, the Consistency Project will ease businesses into the emerging era of widespread climate change-reporting.

For standards setters, the Consistency Project synthesises existing work into an easily comprehensible format. It allows for the highlighting of similarities across countries, the recognition of best practices, and the examination of divergent standards. It will allow areas of overlap and consistency to be identified with ease, and provide a baseline for establishing a globally consistent set of standards. Rather than adding yet another international standard to the proliferating set of existing standards, the Consistency Project will aim to find areas where minimum international consistencies are already established.

One computer is fun, two computers are interesting, a million inter-connected computers is a revolution – the internet. The ability to communicate in clearly understood, standard terms is the key to unlocking the power of networks. And there is no network bigger or more powerful than the global system. This mega-system can be thought of as the global business system embedded in our planetary ecosystem, in our social systems and in our regulatory systems. In order for this system of systems to communicate and learn and to tap into the power of business to reverse the trend of worsening impacts on our climate, a common language is key.

But developing this common language is a grimy thankless task. Who would take this on, working long hours with no recognition deep in the trenches of definitions, principles and logic, bombarded by the criticisms of the status quo, the negativity of those who don’t believe change is possible? ‘Revolutionary bureaucrats’, that’s who. That’s the term Thomas Friedman (Hot, Flat and Crowded) uses to describe those brave souls who commit themselves to the work of redesigning the standards which allow the diverse members of a complex system to connect with each other.

This is courageous work, requiring individuals to think and act in terms of time-scales way beyond the normal horizon of most people. Why do they do so? Because they believe in the value of this work, in the need for it to address problems and/or unleash untapped potentiality. And because they know they have the deep skills which others lack and because they feel that in some sense this work is their duty, the culmination of all their years of experience. This requires a special type of leadership, what Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline, The Necessary Revolution, Presence) calls ‘leading from the future’.

So it should be no surprise that JWT and John Elkington’s Volans team have identified CDSB as one of their ’50 stars in seriously long-term innovation’ in their recent Future Quotient report. The report outlines the ‘7C’s’ – the qualities of those leaders and organisations possessing superior ‘future quotient’, analogous to the familiar ideas of IQ or EQ. The CDSB Technical Working Group embody many of these qualities but I would draw attention in particular to their willingness to challenge the status quo, their curiosity, their incredible collaboration, their courage and their creativity.

Five years into its work, the CDSB stands on the verge of catalysing enormous systemic change. It is testimony to the long-term thinking of all involved that they still feel they have so far to go. I applaud their serious long-term leadership from the future and am delighted that they have received this recognition for their work.

Volans’ report can be found here. Nigel Topping is Chief Innovation Officer of the Carbon Disclosure Project.

The analyses that followed the financial crisis are truly bewildering. It is a dizzying exercise to try to make sense of the frenzy of calls for different behaviours, sustainable markets, focus on systemic risk beyond financial metrics, rebuilding of trust and so on. For me, the main message that stands out from the din is that false knowledge caused many of the blunders that drove the market over the edge. If that is the case, we need reliable information to form part of the architecture that supports the new stable structures we want to build.

Influenced by stakeholder demand, the desire to regain trust, activity by organizations such as the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and Global Reporting Initiative and policy activity in some jurisdictions, companies are energetically responding to that demand for information. There is a sharp increase in sustainability and corporate social responsibility reporting and disclosures on non-financial indicators including businesses’ objectives, strategy, environmental and social impacts, governance practices and so on. The benefits of such reporting include greater transparency, more stakeholder inclusiveness, brand and reputational transformation and, some claim, better financial returns. Many of the reports I have read are innovative and make compelling reading.

Welcome as this is, the rise in non-financial disclosure has caused a dilemma. Some commentators claim that corporate reports are littered with clutter that obscures important messages; others claim that there isn’t enough information and others say that it is the lack of comparabiilty and consistency of information that makes it unusable.

Such claims prompted the establishment of the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB). Climate change related disclosure, including information about a company’s greenhouse gas emissions, strategy for dealing with climate change risks and opportunities and mitigation plans has become embedded in the normal corporate reporting cycle thanks to the efforts of the CDP and others. However, the absence of standards governing what and how to report results in variation in the quality, quantity, presentation and placement of climate change-related information. In the same way that the International Accounting Standards Board creates standards on financial reporting, CDSB seeks to develop a standardised approach to making climate change related disclosures that are suitable for inclusion in the mainstream corporate reports in which companies deliver their annual financial results.

IASB and its predecessors have had over 50 years to work on financial standards. Predictions about dangerous global warming mean that climate change reporting, which is about a decade old, cannot wait that long to make sense to stakeholders. CDSB, which issued the first edition of its Climate Change Reporting Framework in September 2010, is therefore developing its work through a process of continuous improvement, collaboration, testing and revision. Hopefully this will accelerate the speed at which we can get the architecture in place for a more stable future.