The climate crisis is here. It’s not a question of ‘if’ or ‘when’ we will feel its impacts. We already do1. At Etsy, we have long been committed to not only reducing our impact on the planet and managing the climate's impact on our business, but also to being transparent about our progress. We set an ambitious, science-based net zero emissions target2 and, in FY 2018, were one of the first public companies to release an integrated report where we shared our carbon accounting alongside our financial accounting. Now, four years later, the SEC is moving towards making this kind of transparency a requirement for most public companies.

Etsy is broadly supportive of the SEC's recent climate disclosures proposal. We are pleased to see that the SEC's proposal includes many of the requests we made in our 2021 letter to the commission and we are proud that our work was referenced multiple times by the SEC. While our impact work and ESG disclosures certainly reflect Etsy's mission and ethos, it’s important to note that they have also helped our business run more smoothly and efficiently. For example,

• Publishing an integrated Annual report on Form 10-K since 2018 with third-party or internal audit reviews built-in for all climate related disclosures (including Scope 3) has helped strengthen our internal controls;
• Embedding ESG roles into traditional business functions has helped drive greater accountability and improve the adoption of sustainability practices throughout our company. Specifically, we moved our ESG reporting and Sustainable Cloud Computing roles from the Sustainability Team to the Accounting and Engineering teams, respectively;
• Forming a cross-functional ESG disclosure working group (among other ESG related groups) composed of leaders from legal, finance, investor relations, HR and sustainability has improved company-wide understanding of climate issue relevance and supports our climate reporting aligned with SASB and TCFD.

We’re extremely proud to be a leader in this space, but we know first-hand that robust disclosures are complex. While we commend the SEC's efforts to harmonize U.S. climate disclosures with the rest of the world, we also recognize that the proposal isn't perfect. To that end, Etsy recently submitted comments to the SEC that reinforce our broad support for the proposal while suggesting amendments to clarify the proposed rules and help create a realistic and achievable path to more consistent and comparable disclosures by public companies.

As I’ve said before, climate change is material to every industry and needs to be treated as such. It is time to implement feasible standardized climate disclosure policies to enable stakeholders across the board to make more confident and informed decisions in a future that we expect will increasingly be impacted by the climate crisis. And we are long overdue for holding corporations accountable for meeting their sustainability commitments.

We intend to continue to lead by example, but we know that it will take a collective effort from every industry to protect our planet. We look forward to continuing to engage on this topic to create a better future.