On June 12, 1992, at about 3 p.m. local time, President George H. W. Bush walked into a private sanctum at the great global gathering of world leaders convened in Rio de Janeiro by the United Nations, strode up to a bookstand placed between two potted palms and an honor guard, and signed the leather-bound “Framework Convention on Climate Change on behalf of the United States.”

The strokes of his pen committed the nation to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, associated with climate change and global warming, on a schedule that remained to be determined.

Shortly thereafter President Bush entered the Plenary hall where nearly all the world’s leaders were assembled to hear his speech and said, “Today I invite my colleagues from the industrialized world to join in a prompt start on the Convention’s implementation.”

Yesterday, the Kyoto Protocol to the original convention, establishing that implementation schedule as a matter of international law, entered into international force. Kyoto sets specific targets for emissions reductions from many nations, including all of the European Union, but the current President Bush has repudiated ratification so the requirements do not apply to America.

In the 13 years intervening between the Bush administrations, debate on climate change has reigned. But a key data gap has existed – how is business acting on the climate change issue and why? This missing data is now being collected by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a group of 143 major institutional investors, including both the New York City Retirement System and the New York City Teachers Retirement System, who are responsible for the allocation of $20 trillion in capital assets.

The CDP, a special project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA) that provides advice and fiscal oversight, seeks to standardize and make public information about corporate energy use and emissions patterns by sending a detailed annual questionnaire to the 500 largest companies in the world.

In 2004, 59% of the firms replied, up from 47% in 2003. And whether fully responding or not, 45% did answer that they “believe climate change represents risk and/or opportunity,” according to the 2004 report of the CDP.

This month, CDP issued its third round of questions, known as CDP-3, and companies are being asked to reply in four months. Based in London, the CDP was formed to provide markets reliable information. The collaboration also includes such firms as Barclays PLC, ABN Amro Asset Management, Credit Suisse, Swedish National Pensions Funds, Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, Munich Re, and UBS Global Asset Management.

Commenting on the growth of CDP, James Cameron, its chairman said, “Investors are saying that climate change can impact shareholder value both positively and negatively … and companies are now acknowledging they should communicate what they know to their investors or, at the very least, find out what they don’t know.”

Information received through the CDP is compiled into a report on climate change and shareholder value, by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, which is circulated among collaborating institutions, as well as posted on the CDP Web site. The questionnaires and all responses are also posted on the site.

To walk the line between disclosure and proprietorial information, companies may stipulate that certain information not be made public, though made available by password to CDP members only.

The lack of verifiable standardized data on emissions patterns has been a strategic gap at least since 1992 and was noted then in a report of the International Chamber of Commerce on business and the environment, which said,”…research into the minimization of adverse impacts of raw materials, products, processes, emissions, and waste is becoming more and more the key to future competitiveness.”

CDP was the brainchild of Paul Dickinson, now its coordinator, and colleagues in the British investment world. Underwritten at first by a few philanthropies in Britain, CDP now also has US philanthropic support and is provided fiscal oversight and advice by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, based in New York City. CDP itself is a lean operation, with a budget of roughly $500,000. Its importance is its leverage, and RPA president, Melissa Berman, observes “we took the project on and participate in it because it is so closely aligned with the interest of many of the donors we work with, who are seeking pragmatic ways to improve the environment.”

CDP’s pragmatism lies in the principle that knowledge has value. Or as Jeffrey R. Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric, a CDP responder puts it: “We are moving ahead with data collection and analysis to enable us to plan for the future.”

CDP’s questionnaire asks such questions as “do you have a strategy regarding preparation of emerging greenhouse gas emissions regulations…” or “please specify the methodology you employ for measuring emissions, and explain if these data are audited and/or externally verified.” And while there are generic “we-are-leaders”-type replies, there are also hard numbers and real information.

Through CDP an investor can see at a glance what a responding company’s emissions have been, whether a reduction trend exists, and whether the company appears to have a grip on its energy use, an indicator of good management regardless of any policy view. CDP’s core goal is to provide the world’s largest companies with an objective format for making public their emissions patterns, on the mounting evidence that corporations believe it wise to come to terms with climate-change exigencies. Though America today stands outside the Kyoto Protocol’s reach, many major American corporations do business in Europe, where emissions reductions are now mandatory and so harmony of business practice makes business sense.

Meanwhile, science continues to examine the climate question. This month, NASA released a report that said 2004 was the fourth warmest year since temperature measurement began in the 19th century. Also this month, scientists reported unprecedented loss of major ice sheets in Antarctica. And, in 2003, climate change was fingered explicitly for the first time as a factor by major reinsurers in weather-related natural disasters that caused $70 billion in damage, of which only $18.5 billion was insured.

It was 15 years between the first scientific paper in 1984 postulating that man-made substances were burning a hole in the ozone layer and the coming into legal force of the international Montreal Protocol in 1999, which the U.S. did ratify and which banned the use of those substances that, by now, are regarded as irrefutably destructive.

As the Kyoto Protocol marks 13 years of international climate change concern, capital wealth represented by the CDP group has grown from $4.5 trillion to today’s $20 trillion in just three years. CDP co-founder Dickinson observes only a one-way trend and says “there is no evidence of reduction of interest in greenhouse gas emissions information.”