The California Air Resources Board (CARB) — under the direction and authority of the California Legislature — developed a checklist to ease the disclosure of climate-related financial risks in accordance with California's Climate-Related Financial Risks Act, also known as Senate Bill 261 (SB261).
SB261 requires companies with at least $500M in annual revenue doing business in California to publicly disclose their climate-related financial risks and mitigation strategy every two years, starting 2026. To reduce the burden for this first year, CARB indicates that good-faith, minimum reporting requirements are acceptable:
- No emissions disclosures or scenario analysis are required.
- You can use reasonably-available data, representing either 2023/2024 or 2024/2025.
Note: These allowances apply only to 2026 reporting; future years will have more robust requirements.
From Sustainability Explorer, you can include the content of the SB261 checklist, such as to bookmark requirements and align them with Sustainability Program metrics for data collection.
Include SB261 in Sustainability Explorer
To include CARB's checklist for climate-related financial risk disclosures in Sustainability Explorer, select California Climate Related Financial Risk disclosures (SB261) in Frameworks from the Properties panel.
Note: Depending on your company's Workiva subscription, you may need to request California Climate Related Financial Risk disclosures (SB261) for Sustainability Explorer from your Workiva Customer Success Manager (CSM).
View related TCFD or IFRS content
To help identify climate-related risks to disclose for SB261, you can also use Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) or International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Sustainability Disclosure Standards. If you enable TCFD or IFRS in Sustainability Explorer, you can view its corresponding content for an SB261 requirement in Related.
To review an SB261 requirement and its related TCFD or IFRS content side-by-side, click the content in Related to open it in the Explore panel.
Tip: To view the related content in the main pane instead of the panel, click Open in Explorer from the Explore panel.
Align CARB content with Program metrics
From Sustainability Explorer, you can align content from CARB with metrics that collect related values in Sustainability Program.
Tip: If you have metrics aligned with related TCFD or IFRS content, you can also align them with their corresponding CARB content.
- From Sustainability Explorer, search for or browse to the CARB content, then click Connect to program metric .
- Select or add the Program metric the content aligns with, then click Apply.
Tip: From the Framework indices section of the Factbook spreadsheet, you can prepare responses based on these metrics' values as the source for your SB261 reporting outputs.
To learn more, view Align Program metrics with Sustainability Explorer content.
Submit report for SB261
Note: Submissions for SB261 are currently voluntary pending a legal appeal.
To submit your company's Climate-related Financial Risk report to CARB for SB261:
- Post the report on your company's publicly-accessible website.
- Submit the report through CARB's public SB261 docket:
- In Message, enter the URL for the report's posting on your company website.
- To submit a consolidated report for your parent and subsidiary companies, upload a statement on official letterhead with a list of the applicable subsidiaries.
To learn more, refer to CARB's Climate-Related Financial Risk Reports (SB261) Docket.