The FE-EVI Green Business Survey ? 2008 will be released on December 19. Conducted by AC Nielsen-ORG MARG, the s urvey promises to offer an insight into the perceptions, policies and practices of corporate India in its endeavour to convert the risks of climate change into business opportunities.

This survey assesses the climate change awareness of corporate India and the gap between awareness and the follow up action. The survey questions were structured to find out how business leaders look at climate change, India?s position under the Kyoto Protocol and whether they are measuring their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to better understand impacts and challenges they may face from climate change.

To know more about the actions contemplated by Indian businesses, the survey looked for the drivers of this change and whether these are external players like regulators, investors and consumers or internal players like senior managements and employees.

The next level of questions sought to weigh climate change challenges and differentiate between physical, operational and regulatory risks and how they impact different sectors and categories of companies.

Finally, it was followed up with questions to understand how to turn climate change risks into business opportunities and find out who is shouldering the responsibility and leading from the front.

The survey covered 213 companies from the FE 500 list of 2007. The FE 500 list is a composite ranking of India?s top 500 companies by net sales, total assets, gross profits, market capitalisation, return on net worth, return on assets and return on sales. The survey is important in terms of the spread of the number of top Indian companies interviewed.

Purposive sampling was done with a focus on energy intensive industries, which have a high level of direct or indirect GHG emissions. A quantita- tive questionnaire was used to collect the information from surveyed companies. The information was collected through face-to-face structured interviews with CEOs and CIOs. In some of the cases, the interview was conducted with senior executives deputed by them.

The maximum number of companies (20%) was from the manufacturing sector. Another 12% each were from the metals & cement and BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) sectors. Companies from the real estate sector comprised 10% of the respondents. Others belonged to pharma, services, auto, oil, gas & mining, chemicals & fertilisers.

The surveyed companies included about 70% leading Indian private companies, 17% multinational companies (MNCs) and 14% public sector undertakings (PSUs).

The survey covered 17% of the top 100 companies, 21% top 100-300 companies and 62% top 300-500 companies, as per the FE 500 list.