March 21, 2022 SEC Proposed Rule Amendments
The Securities and Exchange Commission proposed rule amendments that would require a domestic or foreign registrant to include certain climate-related information in its registration statements and periodic reports, such as on Form 10-K, including:
- Climate-related risks and their actual or likely material impacts on the registrant’s business, strategy, and outlook;
- The registrant’s governance of climate-related risks and relevant risk management processes;
- The registrant’s greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions, which, for accelerated and large
- accelerated filers and with respect to certain emissions, would be subject to assurance;
- Certain climate-related financial statement metrics and related disclosures in a note to its audited financial statements; and
- Information about climate-related targets and goals, and transition plan, if any.
The proposed disclosures are similar to those that many companies already provide based on broadly accepted disclosure frameworks, such as the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures and the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.
While these proposed rule amendments help validate the capital formation that is taking place in the ESG compliance space over the past few years, they still leave a lot of room for interpretation and doubt. Many of these questions were discussed in our March newsletter when we talked about what was on Investor’s minds.
As if it wasn’t challenging enough for well funded publicly traded companies to understand these coming requirements, our perspective is that it will be the small medium businesses (SMB’s), which play a major role in the supply chain, that will struggle even more to collect the data needed for compliance. Collecting the data, managing tasks, benchmarking against peers and implementing risk/compliance tools amongst these smaller players in the supply chain will be necessary to satisfy these SEC amendments. It’s these major challenges that we believe vranda can help solve.
Recent Deals In the ESG Space
Workiva acquires Parseport. Workiva acquired ParsePort for $100 million in cash.
Accenture acquires Avieco. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Goldman Sachs acquires NN Investment Partners. The purchase price is €1.6 billion.
measurabl acquires Hatch Data. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
