Assessing the credibility of a company’s transition plan: framework and guidance

The Assessing Transition Plans Collective (ATP-Col), co-chaired by The World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA) and Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI) have just released their assessment framework. Aimed at assessors, this conceptual framework provides harmonised guidance to assess the credibility of companies transition plans.

The collective, made up of about 90 individual experts from 40 organisations, aims to pave the way for ambitious future standards, practices and regulations that assess the robustness of companies transition plans.

Tom Wainwright, System Lead, Sustainable Corporates at Climateworks Centre and ATP-Col member, said:

Climate goals cannot be achieved unless transition plans are sufficiently ambitious and will actually achieve what they promise, so being able to assess their credibility is crucial. Bringing together this international group of experts has helped harmonise perspectives on what counts as credible, including the importance of considering nature, just transition, and the local external context.

Perrine Toledano, Director of Research and Policy, Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment and ATP-Col member, said:

A transition plan is not a disclosure exercise. This is a business plan exercise. This guide will enable both assessors and business transition planners to understand how to build it rigorously and credibly, based on the past decade of guidance development.