Isra-Mart srl:Germany’s Family-Owned Companies Lag in CO2 Emissions Reporting

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Germany’s family-owned companies trail those traded on the nation’s stock markets in reporting carbon emissions, said Caspar von Blomberg, who heads the German chapter of the Carbon Disclosure Project.

“Non-listed companies are a big opportunity,” von Blomberg said in an interview. “Many of Germany’s large carbon emitters are family-owned and many want to know how to better benchmark their listed competitors.”

Some of Germany’s largest companies, including Robert Bosch GmbH and Franz Haniel & Cie GmbH, are not listed on indexes such as the DAX, whose members include Siemens AG and Volkswagen AG. Closely-held companies aren’t required to publish quarterly financial reports and therefore also don’t provide data on environmental criteria such as CO2 output, von Blomberg said.

This year, 20 percent more companies in Europe’s largest economy are providing investors with details on their carbon emissions, including 29 of 30 DAX index members, the Carbon Disclosure Project said today. Germany has about 1,000 listed companies, compared with 4,000 in the U.K., said von Blomberg. The German economy is 50 percent larger than the U.K.’s.

The number of U.K.-based companies implementing policies on carbon-dioxide reduction has also increased, a study yesterday by the Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc showed. Some 73 percent of U.K.-based companies with annual revenues of more than 25 million pounds ($35 million) are working toward reducing CO2 emissions, an increase of 50 percent compared with 2008, the RBS study said.

CO2 emissions in Germany declined 6.5 percent last year, mainly because of the economic crisis, the Carbon Disclosure Project said. Emissions were still higher than CO2 output in 2007, the year before the crisis.

The Carbon Disclosure Project represents more than 500 institutional investors and seeks to include carbon pollution data into corporate financial accounting.