Engagement with health in the climate reports of top corporations

Climate change threatens health and wellbeing globally, requiring the combined attention of multiple societal actors. To assess corporate participation, this study's objective was to quantify engagement with health in publicly available corporate climate reports in Australia.

Climate reports from Australia's top 500 corporations as determined in September 2023 were obtained in September 2023-April 2024 from their websites or replies to email requests. Content analysis was used to locate and quantify health and other words within the reports. The characteristics of corporations with climate reports were compared to those without climate reports in terms of market capitalisation, sector, emissions reduction, and country of incorporation.

Among the top 500 corporations, 51 (10.2 %) had standalone climate reports available by April 2024. Climate reports were predominately found for larger corporations and those with the highest emissions per million AUD market capitalisation. The sector with the greatest proportion of climate reports was the utilities sector (62.5 %). Companies without and with climate reports had a non-significant difference in median absolute change in tonnes of CO₂ equivalents emissions per million AUD market capitalisation (-0.2 vs -6.9, p = 0.706) from 2017-2018 to 2022-2023. Fifty (96.2 %) climate reports mentioned a climate change-related health word. Two-thirds (n = 34) of climate reports referred to specific actions to tackle health impacts.

While a relatively small percentage of top Australian companies, representing a range of sectors, had standalone climate reports in 2023-2024, health impacts and adaptation to reduce these impacts are acknowledged and discussed in most of these climate reports.