We filter the risk disclosure statements that include climate change discussions from the recent 10 years of 10-K forms filed by all the public companies in the U.S. With this novel data, we conduct the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) analysis to identify the firms’ views of climate change at the industry and the economy level. We find that the clustered topics are material adverse financial condition, compliance costs of efficiency standards, physical effects of global climate, changing legislation regulations, cap and trade of greenhouse gasses, weather conditions and natural disasters, Clean Power Plan, and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations. Most firms do not cover climate change topics except those from the polluting industries, those subject to significant environmental regulation, and those vulnerable to climate change. Most of the firms regard the climate change risk as a set of sustainability risks, though 23% of disclosures view it as a set of regulatory risks.

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