Leading South African corporates have again performed well ahead of the global norm in reporting their carbon emissions, with 83 of the companies making up the JSE 100 participating in the seventh edition of the South African Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) – the second-highest response rate after Europe, where 90% of companies responded.

The performance is higher than the 81% of the Global 500 sample and well ahead of their Brics-bloc counterparts, with 56% of the Brazil 80, 19% of the China 100, 27% of the India 200 and 18% of the Russia 50 responding.

Taken together with Eskom, South Africa’s largest emitter, the responding companies account for 60% of South Africa’s total estimated emissions of about 559.65-million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Mining company Gold Fields and banking group Nedbank emerged as South Africa’s overall disclosure leaders this year, achieving perfect scores of 100 points. But Anglo American, Barloworld, FirstRand, Growthpoint Properties, Harmony Gold, Nampak, Pick n Pay and Remgro have also been included in the Climate Disclosure Leadership Index, with disclosure scores raging from 97 to 99 points.

The CDP surveys more than 5 000 companies worldwide on behalf of 722 institutional investors, which represent $87-trillion in assets, and the 2013 South African survey generally showed improving response trends.

In addition, 13 companies made voluntarily submissions, including Basil Read, Caxton and CTP Publishers and Printers, Distell Group, Group Five, Hulamin, Industrial Development Corporation, JSE Limited, KPMG South Africa, Raubex, Scaw Metals, the South African Post Office, Transnet and the National Business Initiative (NBI), which oversees the local CDP.

NBI CEO Joanne Yawitch says the response rates dispel the “myth” that business does not think climate change is real and that companies are not prepared to act.

But she argued that the report also showed that not enough was being done to meet the reductions required by science and for South Africa to meet its own emissions targets.

Areas of concern, Yawitch says, include the fact that emissions reductions are largely being achieved in one sector (minerals and energy), that businesses are not reporting their most material emissions across their value chains and that targets are still variable in terms of ambition and timelines.

CDP CEO Paul Simpson notes in the foreword that the 400 parts per million (ppm) carbon-dioxide concentration level was breached in 2013 and that the world is rapidly heading towards the 450-ppm level viewed as the upper limit for avoiding dangerous climate change.

“Fears are increasing over future climate change impacts as we see more extreme weather events,” Simpson writes, adding that there is also growing corporate awareness of the need to assess physical risk from climate change and to build resilience.

“For investors, the risk of stranded assets has been brought to the fore by the work of Carbon Tracker. They calculate around 80% of coal, oil and gas reserves are unburnable, if governments are to meet global commitments to keep the temperature rise below 2°C. This has serious implications for institutional investors’ portfolios and valuations of companies with fossil fuel reserves.”