This month we are focusing on transition planning. That’s timely as the body tasked by the UK government with issuing guidance has just published its final set of advice. There’s now a pretty comprehensive resource bank for companies and investors wanting to shift towards a low carbon economy. Already the talk is of moving from voluntary guidance to mandatory requirements, and regulators in different jurisdictions around the world are aligning their approaches.
Coming at a time of “congestion in reporting requirements”, as one of our writers this month tactfully puts it, the danger is that c-suite decision-makers view all this as yet another compliance issue to be managed away. That mindset will only add to the costs and miss the opportunities. A common theme across all the advice we offer here is that plans need to be flexible and be adapted to your own business needs – the path forward is indeed “non-linear” as one of our contributors says.
In all the resources available from the Transition Plan Taskforce, I would especially commend this paper – Putting People at the Heart of Transition Plans. The biggest barriers to making the shift are not technical or even financial, but social. Those people who lose out now inevitably get more traction than those who may gain later. We addressed the same issue in our own guidance last year Getting your business ready to drive a Just Transition.
For sustainability practitioners, the key task is not so much to grapple with the detail or expand the reporting regime (though we have to do all that and more); it is to understand the implications for business strategy and advise our boards accordingly.
Visit the April Monthly Briefing here.
