UK banking group HSBC is among five international companies to receive top marks for its environmental disclosure from the Carbon Disclosure Project, which represents investors with $31 trillion (€24.5 trillion) of global assets.

The others are consumer goods company Unilever, German utility RWE, oil group BP and miner Rio Tinto. They take top positions in the project's climate leadership index, which comprises 50 groups drawn from the 500 largest public companies in the world by market capitalisation. Other banks in the leadership index included HBOS, UBS, ABN Amro, Barclays, Fortis, ING and Citigroup. Franco-Belgian financial services group Dexia and German bank HVB dropped out, though this may be because last year's index comprised 60, not 50, companies. The index rates companies on the quality of information they provide on these issues, not their CO2 emissions or environmental impact. The project was set up in 2000 to pressure companies to improve this disclosure. It said financial institutions including Allianz and Goldman Sachs have published climate change policies in the past year and some banks, such as Citigroup and JP Morgan, have started to produce carbon market-focused equity research. The project's fourth report will be launched today in New York by Lord Turner, former head of UK employers' group the Confederation of British Industry, and Al Gore, former US vice-president and maker of environmental film An Inconvenient Truth (right), which has just opened in the UK. The survey, which requested carbon emissions information from companies in the FT 500 and received a 72% response rate, also revealed a significant jump in the number of companies considering entering the carbon trading markets. The report found 46% said emissions trading was relevant to their operations, up from 35% the previous year and 31% in the 2004 report. Rory Sullivan, head of investor responsibility at UK fund manager Insight Investment, said the project had "played an important role in raising the awareness of climate change as a business issue… yet it has become increasingly clear the various disclosure initiatives are not providing the information required to allow investors to properly assess the financial implications of climate change". He said investors should not rely on initiatives such as the project but should press companies directly for better disclosure. "Delegating responsibility to a third party to gather this information perpetuates the message that investors are really not interested in the issue of climate change," Sullivan added.