Carbon Disclosure Project names new chief executive

The Carbon Disclosure Project, the investor-backed initiative that monitors and encourages company disclosure on carbon dioxide emissions, has named Paul Simpson to take over from Paul Dickinson as chief executive officer.

Simpson was previously the CDP’s chief operating officer. Dickinson will become executive chairman, overseeing the board and working with other entities to maximize CDP’s impact around the world.

Indeed, the management change follows increasingly closer ties between the CDP and bodies such as the Global Reporting Initiative. The CDP already partners with 10 organisations as well as with firms such as Bank of America – Merrill Lynch, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Sustainalytics and Bloomberg and software providers like Microsoft and SAP.

Simpson has been with CDP for nine and a half years. He has previously worked with Chesham Amalgamations & Investments Ltd, the InternationalSociety for Ecology & Culture and is a former director of the Social Venture Network. He’s also on the board of advisory firm EIRIS.

“Over the last ten years CDP has catalysed a dramatic increase in the measurement, reporting and management of climate change impacts by corporations,” Simpson said.

The CDP is an independent not-for-profit organisation collecting key climate change data from some 3,000 companies around the globe and has assembled the largest database of corporate greenhouse gas emissions and climate change information in the world. It was founded in 2000.

Last month the CDP named four German companies – Siemens, Deutsche Post, BASF, Bayer – and Korea’s Samsung – as the top five companies worldwide for carbon disclosure and performance in its 2010 Global 500 report.

Upcoming this month are the launch of CDP reports in Asia, the Nordic region and Germany.