Deadline for institutional investors to access firms' carbon data approaches

Institutional investors have exactly two weeks left to contact the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and sign up to its annual effort to contact more than 4,000 companies globally and request data on their greenhouse gas emissions and climate change strategies.

The not-for-profit body issues information requests on behalf of institutional investors who believe that data on a firm's carbon emissions and climate change strategy can help inform their investment decisions.

Last year, 475 investors with a combined $55tr (£34tr) in assets under management signed the CDP information requests, and the organisation is confident that more investors will support this year's round of information requests ahead of them being sent out on February 1.

"In 2008, 385 investors signed up and last year that had risen to 475 investors," said a spokeswoman for the CDP. "We are expecting the number of investors to grow further. Some are specialist socially responsible investors (SRI), but large numbers are mainstream institutional investors."

Each year the CDP produces a public report detailing the responses of the firms that received the information requests and the carbon emissions of those that provided detailed environmental data.

However, those institutional investors that sign up to the CDP information requests can access firms' responses as soon as they are received by the group and also access information from those firms that choose to provide climate change data to investors through the CDP but refuse to grant it permission to disclose that data publicly.