| Abstract [eng] |
Climate change affects almost all economic sectors, just the impact of risks differs by sector, organisation, industry, and geography. One of the ways to mitigate climate change is to innovate and adopt financial instruments. Mandatory climate reporting can trigger an improvement in carbon performance because of legislative and societal pressure. Unfortunately, identifying and quantifying climate risks and opportunities seems to be a challenge for companies. The biggest issue for companies is that they have a lack of knowledge and skills to identify what scenarios could seriously disrupt the company‘s operations. Furthermore, there is no dedicated accounting standard related to climate-related matters, which leads to inconsistency in reporting. Just half of the reviewed companies included the results of their scenario analysis in their disclosures. In January, 2021, regulators released new reporting standards set by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) requiring all commercial companies to develop more effective climate-related financial disclosures. Companies should assess which financial impacts are likely to impact their revenues, expenditures, assets, liabilities, capital and financing. Considering that, the main aim of the research was to develop a methodology to assess climate-related matters’ effects on a company's financial statements. The objectives were created to highlight the issues related to climate change and their effects on financial statements, to analyse theoretical solutions to existing climate-related matters disclosure methods in the financial statements, to develop a methodology to identify climate-related matters disclosed in companies' financial statements, and to empirically investigate the effects of climate-related matters on a selected company’s financial statements and make recommendations for other companies. Identifying risks and opportunities, stress testing, and scenario analysis are ways for a company to imagine plausible future worlds and plan for resilience. The main findings of the research revealed that accounting for climate-related matters is difficult due to uncertainty in calculation approaches. The biggest challenge is to evaluate "rebound effects" when future climate change might reduce energy usage and hence energy costs. Leading to increases in customers' incomes and hence energy consumption. For this purpose, a collaboration between accounting academics and the natural science sectors can mitigate the drawbacks of matters related to climate change disclosures in financial statements; otherwise, the matching of physical and monetary data should only be treated as an approximation. A deeper examination of the facts, however, reveals that some companies tend to report just because of ecological modernisation, which is nothing more than "greenwashing". Other companies just ignore measurements entirely. The research involved qualitative information to identify specific risk and opportunity areas affecting a company, supported where possible by high-level quantitative assessments to offer insight into how climate-related risks and opportunities may affect a company’s existing and future financial statement line items. Future research can contribute to finding more systematic tools, allowing companies of all sizes and in different sectors to adapt data from different scientific research fields and studies. |
