XBRL

The Carbon Disclosure Project & CDSB are currently working with a group of global experts, including representatives from Fujitsu, to develop our own XBRL Climate Change Reporting Taxonomy in order to encourage the adoption of the CCRF (Climate Change Reporting Framework) as the standard for climate change reporting aimed at satisfying investors.

What is XBRL?

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is a freely available, market-driven, open, and global standard for exchanging business information. XBRL is a standards-based way to communicate and exchange business information between business systems. These communications are defined by metadata set out in XBRL taxonomies, which capture the definition of individual reporting concepts as well as the relationships between concepts and other semantic meaning. Common functions in many countries that make use of XBRL include regulators of stock exchanges and securities, banking regulators, business registrars, revenue reporting and tax-filing agencies, and national statistical agencies.

Although XBRL does not improve the quality of data in corporate reports immediately and directly, it reduces mechanical data entry, eliminates entry errors, encourages more analysis of data, facilitates comparisons against external data, and provides greater transparency. XBRL is an important tool in allowing all stakeholders to more efficiently share and analyze information. These subsequently affect the quality and quantity of corporate reporting data.

Why is XBRL important to CDSB?

CDSB, its members of the board and of the Technical Working Group, share a common vision of a future where climate change disclosure will be a common feature of all business reporting and that it will ultimately be integrated with mainstream financial reporting. Recognizing that regulators around the world are mandating the use of interactive data for electronic filing of statutory reports, the leading partners are committed to developing a Climate Change Reporting Language at an early stage so that data language can evolve alongside standards and practices for disclosing climate change related information.

With this objective in mind, CDSB initiated the process for the definition of such a Climate Change Reporting Language (CCRL). The CCRL initiative aims to develop a taxonomy that will be a representation of the most common reporting schemes so as to allow systems to process and communicate climate change data. In the longer term, the intention is that the data standard will establish the necessary links between financial business data and reporting and the new needs of information for a carbon constrained economy.

The main objective behind the creation of this standard is to reduce the administration and cost for reporting organizations, promote standardization of information and facilitate the delivery of real time information to markets and a range of different stakeholders, by facilitating the filing of climate change-related information in an electronic standard format.

We believe that such a standard can promote the efficient use and exchange of information between software applications, regulatory and voluntary registries, verifiers, ERP packages, etc, considerably reducing the cost of producing, managing, finding, exchanging and analyzing the available data. Furthermore, due to the increasing number of regulations, standards and calculation methodologies, it is believed that the production of a high-level standard, defining and documenting in an ambivalent form the concepts to be reported, will facilitate the common understanding around climate change data and concepts.