Although the cloud of coal dust obscured other issues, the gathering made some significant progress.
The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board in the United States, established by the Value Reporting Foundation and supported by Bloomberg, has developed one model. The World Economic Forum has worked on another. That, you may think, is quite enough acronyms for one paragraph. But another one entered the field of battle in Glasgow.
One obvious problem is that after years of effort by the IASB to reconcile its standards with those of the US standard-setters, the Americans have still not adopted them and seem unlikely to do so. "I do not want to live in a world where me and my peers have to suffer through disasters," an activist at COP26 tells CNA's The Climate Conversations:In an interview that the European Central Bank supervisors circulated to banks in the week after the ISSB announcement at COP26, John Berrigan, the Commission’s financial services director-general, discussed the EU’s taxonomy and plans for a new Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, without mentioning the ISSB.
The precise figure he quoted, US$130 trillion, has raised a few sceptical eyebrows, but the scale of the ambition is impressive, and most banks of any consequence have signed up to the scheme.