Europe's role in a global shift toward credible transition

From commitments to delivery: the challenge that remains

Europe has helped establish that companies should transition without leaving people behind or degrading nature. But these pressures arrive together and reinforce one another. Climate change, nature loss, widening inequality and the rapid scaling of AI are reshaping risks for people and the environment at the same time, and cannot be managed in isolation. A company cannot credibly decarbonise while degrading nature or pushing the costs of change onto its workers. The transition is one connected system, and integration is the essential next step in that direction, one that needs a common language and a common evidence base.

That evidence base is what is missing today. Across every market, the challenge is moving from commitments and disclosure to implementation and real-world outcomes. Companies remain far stronger on stating ambitions than on showing how those ambitions change practice. For example, while more than half of the 2,000 companies assessed in WBA's 2026 Social Benchmark now disclose general human rights commitments, only 17% identify human rights risks in their supply chains, and just 9% disclose the action they have taken to address them. Around 95% of these companies remain less than halfway to meeting core social expectations. The direction Europe is helping to set is clear. What stakeholders increasingly need is credible evidence of whether companies are actually delivering.

This is the gap the Integrated Transition Assessment (ITA) is designed to help close.

Where the ITA adds value 

The EU is helping define a new global direction for corporate accountability, and CSRD and CSDDD are important steps along it. But regulation sets expectations and requires disclosure. On its own, it does not provide a comparable, cross-market picture of how companies are performing against those expectations. The ITA is built to provide that evidence, and it does so in ways that connects directly to the European agenda.

It turns disclosure into interpretable evidence. CSRD, built on the principle of double materiality, has expanded what companies disclose about their impacts and risks. The value now lies in interpretation, in understanding what the disclosure means for people, nature and the transition. The ITA is built on the same impact-and-risk logic and maps to the themes European reporting already covers, from climate to biodiversity to workers in the value chain. It turns reported data into a comparable read of transition progress, not just what a company disclosed, but how far it has genuinely moved. 

It shows whether due diligence is working in practice. The CSDDD already applies an integrated lens, treating human rights and environmental due diligence as a single duty across a company's chain of activities. It asks companies to identify, prevent, mitigate and remediate their impacts, not simply to hold policies. But credible due diligence is difficult to demonstrate, and few companies can yet evidence it convincingly. This is where the ITA adds value. It assesses whether commitments become practice across the areas where this is hardest, from living wage and responsible purchasing to stakeholder engagement and remedy, and makes the difference between genuine delivery and paper compliance comparable across all 2,000 companies. Progress is possible and measurable. For instance, the number of companies disclosing a credible living-wage methodology has grown from 49 in 2024 to 131 in 2026, with companies such as Neste in Finland pairing a living-wage commitment with a 2030 supply-chain target and a Fair Wage Network gap assessment. By surfacing and comparing this evidence at scale, the ITA helps separate genuine leadership from ambition.

It fills the gap brought about by the Omnibus rollback. The recent Omnibus rollback has significantly narrowed the scope of companies subject to CSRD disclosure. It also removed the requirement to adopt a climate transition plan under CSDDD and limited supply chain due diligence to companies’ direct business relationships. This leaves a widening gap between the companies stakeholders need visibility into and what regulation now requires. The ITA will help to close that gap by providing stakeholders with a consistent, comparable view of transition performance regardless of regulatory scope, and by assessing the quality of climate transition plans and supply chain engagement and due diligence.

It brings responsible AI into the same integrated view. The rapid scaling of AI cuts across energy and water use, the future of work and people's rights, which is why it belongs within an integrated assessment rather than a siloed one. The EU AI Act sets a reference point for transparency and the protection of fundamental rights. For the first time across 2,000 companies, the ITA will assess not only whether companies have a responsible-AI strategy in place, but whether they account for AI's impacts across climate, nature and social, drawing on the EU AI Act among other standards. As European expectations on AI take shape, the ITA offers a comparable view of how the world's most influential companies are managing a fast-moving source of risk. 

It supports the next generation of transition finance. Europe's sustainable-finance framework is evolving toward backing credible transitions. The proposed reform of the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation would introduce a new "Transition" category for products invested in companies that are not yet sustainable but are on a credible transition path, alongside the net-zero-aligned EU Taxonomy. Identifying such a path takes credible, comparable evidence across climate, nature and social, precisely the signal the ITA is designed to give investors, banks and insurers.