Exxon Mobil headquarters in Houston

Under growing pressure from investors, Exxon Mobil Corp. this week joined some 237 other companies that have publicly committed to include climate-related data in their financial disclosure reports.

Exxon announced its intentions in a statement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. The commitments by 237 other companies were part of a Tuesday announcement by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, a group established by the international Financial Stability Board, an organization that makes recommendations about the global financial system.

Exxon's statement said the company's board of directors “has decided to further enhance the company's disclosures … and will seek to issue these disclosures in the near future. These enhancements will include energy demand sensitivities, implications of two degree Celsius scenarios, and positioning for a lower-carbon future.”

Exxon noted in its statement that the board had reconsidered a shareholder proposal raised at its May 31 annual meeting requesting a report on the impact of climate change policies. The proposal received 62 percent of the shareholder vote, which was nonbinding on the company, but the board opposed such a report at that time.

Exxon also has been locked in a court fight with the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York over whether the company has concealed its knowledge of the role fossil fuels have in climate change and has misled investors and consumers.

Exxon's statement indicated it would be adopting some of the recommendations of the financial disclosure task force, although the company's name is not listed as a member of the TFCFD on the group's website. The task force is led by New York businessman and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Mark Carney, chairman of the Financial Stability Board.

The task force's recommendations are voluntary for its member companies, which span a variety of industries in 29 countries, from capital and investment to energy to transportation.

In a statement, Bloomberg said, “Climate change poses both economic risks and opportunities. But right now, companies don't have the data they need to accurately measure the risks and evaluate the opportunities.”

The task force's recommendations will help change that by empowering companies to measure and report risks in a more standardized way, he added.

Jane Montgomery, an environmental partner with Schiff Hardin in Chicago, said this week's developments on climate change reporting were important and affect companies and their in-house counsel.

“In the past,” Montgomery said, “this [climate change disclosures] has been handled as a side issue in sustainability reports. Now they are putting it front and center for the investor.”

The disclosures will have an impact as investors demand more information about climate change, and that will affect how an investor looks at a company, Montgomery explained.

“This means top business leaders are going to begin treating this as a mainstream business issue,” she said.