S&P adds green index

Investors received another tool Monday designed to track green themes and greenbacks.

Standard & Poor's launched on Monday its S&P U.S. Carbon Efficient Index, designed to measure the performance of large-cap U.S. companies operating with a low carbon emissions footprint.

The index, which currently has 362 companies gleaned from the S&P 500, are selected using calculations from Trucost, an environmental data gathering organization.

David Blitzer, chairman of Standard & Poor's Index Services index committee, said in a statement, "Organizations around the world are paying greater attention to the impact of greenhouse gases on our climate, as increasingly more investors consider carbon efficiency as an important investment theme."

The U.S. Carbon Efficient Index is part of S&P's global thematic index series, which also covers such green themes as water, forestry, and carbon efficiency.

Microsoft, Cisco, Apple, and Google are among the tech companies included in the U.S. Carbon Efficient Index.

[carolyn_urban]

Dawn mentions that investors are increasingly interested in understanding where companies stand on sustainability and ?green? issues. Companies in Europe are ahead of us due to their requirement to measure carbon reduction as part of signing the Kyoto protocol. As US companies move towards reporting carbon footprint, they require tools to assist with measurement. As well as being able to link to building control systems, new space management systems are also able to link with carbon footprint tracking. Room booking software can be linked in with control systems which then tracks and manages the use of rooms and spaces. All of the data can be aggregated with regard to energy consumption and presented in a user digestible format. In effect it enables energy usage to be attributed to teams and areas within a building. The principle is based on ?you can?t manage what you can?t measure? and is an opportunity to provide facility managers with the necessary information to demonstrate where savings can be made. Clearly benchmarking energy use in equivalent types of space in different parts of a building or even across buildings can help to pinpoint areas for change and therefore reducing costs and consumption.