New York - Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, Monday jumped onboard a massive push to measure the carbon footprint of the world's manufactured products, pledging to study seven if its most popular items including toothpaste and DVDs. The announcement was made in New York at the release of the fifth annual report of the Carbon Disclosure Project, a group of 315 companies such as ABN AMRO and the London Pensions Fund Authority who are using the leverage of their massive investments to force companies to change.
The project represents 41 trillion dollars in financial muscle, or one-third of the world's estimated investment in capital markets.
Wal-Mart executive vice president John Fleming said the commitment was "an important first step toward reaching our goal of removing non-renewable energy form the products Wal-Mart sells."
The announcement was made downtown in Manhattan's financial district as world leaders met uptown at the United Nations to discuss climate change. The first speaker at the UN was California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, but US President George W Bush - who has resisted joining mandatory guidelines to reduce emissions - is skipping the meetings and will only attend a banquet in New York later Monday evening.
Wal-Mart said it would work with the Carbon Disclosure Project to measure the amount of energy used to create seven products - DVDs, toothpaste, soap, milk, beer, vacuum cleaners and soda.
One of Wal-Mart's major suppliers, News Corp's Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, has already started analyzing its supply chain for its carbon impact, the company said in a press release.
"This is a learning process and the members of this group are pioneers addressing some of the biggest challenges in the world today," said Jim Stanway, senior director of Wal-Mart's global supply chain, according to a statement released by the company.
In its report, the Carbon Disclosure group said that an increasing number of companies regard climate change as both a risk and opportunity, though US corporations lag behind their European counterparts in grappling with carbon emissions.
The group is pushing companies to take seriously the issues of climate change and escalating energy costs and to "redefine the very basis of competitive advantage and financial performance."
The project's top priority is to get companies to measure their own carbon footprints.
"In business, what gets measured gets managed," Lord Adair Turner of Standard Chartered PLC of Britain said in the report.
The project this year sent questionnaires to 2,400 of the world's largest companies according to their market capitalization, asking how much progress each has made in managing downside risks of climate change and whether they have seized competitive opportunities posed by the risks.
While the responses were analyzed in the report, the project's major measure of success was how many companies even responded.
This year, 1,300 companies, or 54 per cent, responded, including firms in developing countries, a figure that is difficult to compare to past surveys because the project has expanded its geographic reach.
The report notes that among companies listed in London's FT500, North American-based firms still lag behind their European counterparts, with 74 per cent responding compared to 86 per cent for European-based firms.
The North American response rate in this group improved from 66 per cent the previous year. But the region's response rate for only companies in New York's S&P 500 was just 56 per cent. Still, it was an improvement over the 47 per cent response by S&P 500 companies in 2006.
About 240 North American companies are listed on both the S&P 500 and the FT500.
Chinese firms had the worst response rate, with none of the seven companies returning questionnaires. China recently pulled ahead of the US as the world's largest emitter of the greenhouse gasses blamed for global warming, the report noted.
Brazil's response was among the highest single-country rates in the report, with 81 per cent per cent of 60 companies returning the questionnaire.
Paul Dickinson, who heads the Carbon Disclosure Project, said that individual investors could get detailed company portraits at www.cdproject.net. He said that by coordinating the report's release with Monday's UN political gathering, the group hoped to focus intense attention on the issue.
"Investors want to learn how to make money from (climate change), corporations want to learn how to make money from it, and they want the governments to regulate (emissions)," Dickinson said in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
He compared the current status of corporate development on climate change to the early days of the internet, with "Microsofts and Googles to be found" who will figure out how to profit from reduced carbon emissions.
