TCFD Report information comes to life

A recent news story about the U.S. being short on critical IV fluid surprised me. It turns out Baxter produces about 60% of the U.S. supply of IV products at a plant in North Carolina. That plant was damaged by Hurricane Helene a few weeks ago. (The FDA has authorized temporary import of Baxter fluids from other countries while Baxter works to restore production in North Carolina.) (Here’s a recent New York Times article about it.)

I know virtually nothing about Baxter, but I wondered whether they had published at TCFD report (Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure) and if so, how they describe the climate-related risk to their facilities. They published their first TCFD in Dec. 2023 (for 2022) and they don’t mince words. (You can find Baxter’s TCFD report here.) In Section 2 (Strategy) they note that they consider the physical risk to “increased severity of hurricanes/cyclones/typhoons” to be Acute. Bonus points to Baxter for its accuracy! 

Given that TCFD reports are financial disclosure documents, institutional investors (really all investors), not to mention the medical community that relies on Baxter products, should not have been as surprised as I was of the news of the impact of Helene on the supply of IV bags. (One can hope…)

I’ve worked on a few TCFD reports from the writing/publication side and I believe they provide useful disclosure. But, sometimes in reading them, it’s hard to connect them to real life. So, I thought this real life example was worth highlighting.