It is vitally important for investors to understand the risks that climate change may pose to the businesses they have invested in – and the opportunities in transitioning to a low-carbon economy. It’s not an easy task. Climate change may be one of the world’s best-modeled processes in physics, but in finance, the information is scarce. The projections are opaque. There is no consensus on which data matters or how to interpret it.

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While the US has rules requiring public companies to disclose their climate risks, the government has been lax in enforcing these rules. A compelling example of that comes from a New York state government investigation revealing that the Missouri-based Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal producer that filed for bankruptcy in April this year, had withheld its own projection that climate change would lower the demand for coal.

The arrival of the Trump administration is causing concerns that the US will fall further behind in addressing climate change. When our government isn’t willing to step up, we have to take matters into our own hands. For companies that understand the value of identifying and analyzing their climate risks, new help has arrived.

Earlier this month, an international task force led by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg issued a sweeping set of 11 recommendations that give specific instructions on how companies in every industry should disclose information about climate risk and governance, strategy, risk management, metrics and targets.

Just as crucially, the task force’s report takes into account the goal of the Paris climate agreement to keep the world’s rising temperatures at no more than 2C above pre-industrial levels. The report advises businesses to use the 2C warming scenario as a model for analyzing climate risks and the progress they are making.

These guidelines are voluntary, that’s true. But this is a market-led effort that will have an outsized impact. The task force developed the recommendations with the help of heavyweights in business and finance, including investment firm BlackRock, French insurance company Axa and Unilever.

I hope that the two global organizations that set corporate reporting standards, the International Accounting Standards Board and the Financial Accounting Standards Board, will adopt these recommendations. The mandate of the two groups is to protect investors.

But shareholders don’t have to wait. This report gives a framework – and more firepower – to demand disclosure. Measuring the impacts of climate change will help us identify companies that we don’t want to put money into and identify new investment opportunities. Having an agreed upon framework means we can get working towards that economic opportunity.

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We have already seen evidence of how climate change is shaping lives. Research shows that global warming has worsened the drought that has gripped California since 2012. The drought has turned acres of arable land to dust and has led to billions of dollars in financial losses.

We have also seen major investment opportunities that have emerged because of climate change: there are more solar energy jobs than in oil, natural gas and coal in the US.

An analysis by the California Public Employees Retirement Systems (Calpers), which manages $300bn in assets, showed that more than 50% of the emissions from the public company stocks it holds comes from just 100 of over 10,000 companies it is invested in. During the next five years, I and others at Calpers will work with global investor coalitions to demand disclosure of emissions and plans for reducing the emissions from these firms.

For too long the market has been in the dark about how exposed it is to risks and the opportunities that we all know are out there. Now we have the tools to manage these risks and make the most of new opportunities. We’re going to use them.