“There’ll be some protections for a while but transparency around reporting is just going to continue to increase,” Mr Armour said.
Across all directors, only 11 per cent disagreed that their board needed to do more to respond to climate change, but that rose to 22 per cent in the mining sector.
“It’s not that people ignore the issue, it’s that they don’t know where to start.”
AICD managing director Angus Armour
One in four directors in the mining sector were “not at all concerned” about climate risk to their company, which compared to one in five across all industries and only 8 per cent in the agriculture, forestry and fishing sector.
Mr Armour said many mining companies already dedicated significant resources to the issue which could explain why their boards were less likely to think more work was required, but the data collected was inconclusive.
Directors of ASX-listed companies were less likely to be “extremely” or “somewhat” concerned about how climate change risks (48 per cent) compared to directors on government or public sector boards (70 per cent). Around half also saw opportunities for their organisation by proactively responding to climate change.
Mr Armour said that regulatory or political uncertainty and the “operational effects” of climate change were the two largest concerns directors had about how climate change would affect their business, followed by the impact on profit of mitigating climate change.
Directors said the biggest obstacle to acting was the absence of a settled national climate change policy (46 per cent, the most common response) while 38 per cent said their board did not have the time or resources to deal with it.
Less than half of directors (46 per cent) said their board had embedded climate change in their risk management framework, which the report says, “suggests that risk may not be adequately monitored at board level.“
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