According to company documents and legal and corporate governance experts, the tone and wordings in various US companies vary widely when it comes to disclosure to investors about the risk climate change has on their business.

As per the guidelines issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2010, the companies need to address climate risks depending on laws, regulations, international treaties, the consequences of business trends or potential physical impacts of climate events.

Andrew Logan, director of oil and gas and insurance programs for Ceres, a nonprofit that works to address environmental concerns, said there is a wide gap between what companies know and what they are actually disclosing.

Ceres found that around 41% of &P500 companies did not include climate-related disclosure in their 10-K filings in 2013.

It was found that General Electric in its 2014 10-K filing did not mention ‘climate change’ but identified some regulations as a risk factor.

GE also mentioned that introduction of environmental obligations could reduce its profits. It addressed climate change in a separate sustainability report, a spokesman said.

American Electric Power, one of the largest utility companies in the United States with many coal-fired plants, started to disclose information about climate change risk in at least its 2008 10-K filing, a company spokeswoman said.

“Regulation of carbon dioxide emissions could materially increase costs to us and our customers or cause some of our electric generating units to be uneconomical to operate or maintain”, the company wrote in a 2014 filing.