Transition Planning for the Financial Sector

Tender description

Please read Invitation to Tender PDF doc for full information. Background: WWF-UK's finance and economics policy teams work to ensure that the financial system and economy decarbonise, counter the damaging effects of climate change and deliver a nature-positive future. Transition plans have been promoted as one of the key routes by which the UK's (and the world's) finance sector and economy will reach net zero. In 2022, a government-backed Transition Plan Taskforce was set up in the UK to look at developing gold standard private sector climate transition plans. The government committed to making disclosure of these plans mandatory for listed companies and financial institutions. Whilst these plans are primarily designed for climate disclosure, WWF-UK have been exploring how nature could also be incorporated into transition plans. Why WWF-UK needs this project to be carried out: The government's theory of change is that in requiring financial institutions and listed companies to disclose transition plans for their Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, it will create market pressure on them to ensure that those plans are credible and will place the same pressure on all the companies in their financing and supply chains. In other words, disclosure will generate the pressure for transition plans to be credible and acted on by companies. While disclosure is important, we would like to explore its effectiveness and to what extent additional regulatory and accountability requirements would be needed to ensure that transition planning drives real world decarbonisation required to deliver on the UK's net zero commitments. This project aims to understand (a) to what extent current transition plan disclosure requirements, as announced by the UK government and developed through the UK TPT, will help to deliver rapid decarbonisation, and (b) to what extent further action beyond existing commitments and guidance is required from government (and regulators) to ensure that transition planning and its disclosure is robust/credible, easily and widely adopted by FIs and other key stakeholders, and ultimately drives rapid decarbonisation.