Comptroller's speech
News release by United Nations Foundation, 2005 Institutional Investor Summit and CERES.

New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr. and two-dozen leading institutional investors have issued a 10-point action plan calling on U.S. companies, Wall Street firms and the Securities and Exchange Commission to increase their efforts to provide investors with full disclosure of the financial risks presented by climate change. The action plan was released at the 2005 Institutional Investor Summit sponsored by the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES) at the headquarters of the United Nations on Tuesday, May 10th.

"Assessing climate change is now an essential aspect of intelligent investing, for global warming and climate change will have a significant impact on the world's entire economic eco-system," Thompson said to the crowd of more than 300 financial, corporate and investor world leaders at the United Nations. "It will produce shifts in the global economic landscape. For investors, those changes hold both risks and opportunities, and understanding these risks and opportunities is an important part of fiduciary responsibility."

Supporters of the action plan include state treasurers, comptrollers, and pension fund leaders in the United States and abroad.