Climate-dominant approaches to sustainability keep senior business leaders from recognizing the growing corporate exposure to interrelated climate, nature, and social risks, while causing them to miss business opportunities.   

Integrated transition planning is the best way for companies to gain a complete and structured picture of material climate, nature, and social-related issues, and to create a springboard for quantifying value-protecting and value-creating opportunities. The rewards for first movers could be vast. 

This short primer from WBCSD and ERM aims to translate the concept of integrated transition planning into practical steps for building a methodology and approach that delivers results. The primer outlines:   

  • How climate, nature, and social issues interact and why an integrated approach is necessary to avoid blind spots and squandering commercial potential. 
  • Advantages of an integrated approach, such as amplified efficiencies, new commercial opportunities, optimizing climate, nature, and social trade-offs, and improving investor confidence  
  • How companies can get started, including materiality assessments, governance foundations, KPIs, and decision rules, and how to leverage results for corporate finance-grade quantification of opportunities.    
  • Examples for leading companies: although still a developing field, trailblazers across sectors are already scoring successes with an integrated planning approach.  

The primer draws on guidance from the transition planning taskforce (TPT), the network for greening the financial system (NGFS), the taskforce on climate-related financial disclosures (TCFD), and the world business council for sustainable development (WBCSD). It provides a practical entry point to WBCSD’s and ERM’s further work on transition planning and financial quantification.