Strategies Adopted by Indian Corporate Sectors to Mitigate the Carbon Risk: An Analysis

Abstract

The key challenge today, both globally and in India, is to focus on inclusive growth by ensuring economic growth, while at the same time meeting social obligations as well as protecting our environment and ecosystem. Industries are majorly responsible for such adverse climate change as they largely depend upon fossil fuel for energy consumption. Companies are at risk from climate change, whether from emerging carbon legislation, changing weather patterns or rising fuel costs. To make the companies abide by the social, environment and government norms, the Security Exchange Board of India (SEBI) introduced a new clause, according to which it is mandatory for the top 100 listed companies at BSE and NSE (as per market capitalization) to prepare a Business Responsibility Report (BRR) as a part of their annual report in the format as defined by SEBI. This paper analyzes the BRR of top 100 listed companies at NSE (as on July 17, 2013) to see how companies are combating the climate change. The main objective is to identify what carbon management framework was adopted by different sectors of Indian corporate sector to mitigate carbon emission and what strategies companies are following to mitigate carbon emission risk. It was found through Chi-square test that almost all companies have implemented the same carbon management framework. It was also seen that different strategies were adopted by different sectors of Indian corporate sector to mitigate carbon emission.