S&P 500 companies adding climate & physical risk factors

## What this measures

The share of S&P 500 companies whose most recent annual report (10-K) filed in the 12 months to each quarter end added at least one new risk factor about climate change, extreme weather, natural disasters or pandemics, compared with that company's previous 10-K, in percent. One reading per calendar quarter end; each company counts once, whatever its fiscal year end.

## Why it matters

Item 1A is where a company tells investors what could hurt the business. A new climate and physical risk factor is a company putting that exposure on the record for the first time, usually because it has started to bite or can no longer be left unsaid. When the share rises, climate and physical risk is spreading through corporate America's own account of what it faces.

## How to read it

Higher means more companies newly named a climate and physical risk in the past year. Read it against its own history: a rise of several points in a year is a broad shift; a point or two is the normal churn of companies reorganising their risk sections. Company-level detail (which companies, what they added, in one line each) is at /api/v1/risk-factors and on each company's Discourse page.

## What it does not say

It counts additions, not severity, and not risks that were rewritten or already there. When a company splits one risk factor in two or folds several into one, part of that can read as an addition. Risk factors are matched year to year by exact text, identical headings, Voyage embeddings and word overlap, and tagged to a controlled taxonomy by a language model; on a hand-labelled sample of 41 decisions across five companies (including two banks and two big tech names) pairing precision and recall were both 97%, and in a random audit of 30 additions 25 (83%) were genuinely new risks; most of the rest were one risk split into two. Only quarters with at least 300 companies in the window are published.

## Source

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR: each company's original 10-K, Item 1A (Risk Factors). Public domain. Palanor parses every risk factor, pairs it with the prior year's, and classifies the changes. Refreshed weekly (/api/cron/risk-factors-sync).

## Revision — 2026-09-26

Universe updated to current S&P 500 constituents (8 out, 3 in). Out: Builders FirstSource, Molson Coors and The Trade Desk, which left the index on 21 September 2026; Electronic Arts, which was taken private and left on 5 August 2026; and MongoDB, Cloudflare, Snowflake and Zoom, which were never members and had been included in error since May 2026. In: Bloom Energy, Everpure and Illumina, which joined on 21 September 2026. Membership now comes from a dated constituent list refreshed monthly. The corrected list applies from 26 September 2026. Readings before that date are unchanged.