Putting People at the Center of Climate Action: The importance of measuring the Just Transition 

Climate change is the defining challenge of our time. Companies across sectors are working to both mitigate their impacts and adapt to an already changing climate. But a growing body of evidence shows that climate action, when pursued without considering its impacts on people, can disrupt or even halt progress toward a lower-carbon, nature-positive and climate-resilient future.

In practice, this is already happening. Projects focused on mining transition minerals or expanding renewable energy production have faced significant delays or even cancellation due to community opposition stemming from absent or inadequate consultation. These challenges highlight that the success of the climate transition is closely tied to the degree to which potential and actual impacts on workers, communities and consumers are effectively identified and addressed.

As a result, there is increasing interest in understanding these impacts. However, to take effective action businesses need more information on who is being affected, how they are impacted and whether efforts to address these impacts are actually working.

To help fill this gap, Shift has been working with multiple organizations committed to advancing a just transition, including The World Business Council for Sustainable Development, to build consensus around a set of sector-agnostic, quantitative metrics.

This week, Shift has published a set of 19 just transition metrics that can be used to assess whether companies are taking steps to understand and address risks and opportunities for people connected to their climate transition plans.

These metrics focus on key transition-related issues, such as job security and engagement with workers and communities.

The data gathered through using these metrics can provide valuable insights for regulators, businesses and investors around which approaches are working and should be scaled, and where course correction is needed to mitigate impacts.

Increasingly, organizations are using narrative – or “qualitative” – indicators to describe how human rights considerations are integrated into their climate strategies. These descriptions are important, but they need to be complemented by quantitative metrics that offer tangible insight into real-world impacts: which people are affected, where across the organization’s operations the impacts occur, and how those impacts manifest.

For example, our metrics track changes in full-time employment across regions and genders, and assess whether workers are being shifted into or out of more secure forms of labor. The aim is to support better decision-making by enabling companies to more readily identify and take action to address harms affecting workers and communities.

The development of these metrics has been driven by the need for simplicity, practicality and insight. The indicators are grounded in data that companies can reasonably gather, while still providing meaningful insight into outcomes for people. At the same time, they are not intended to capture every possible scenario. Nor could they, given the diversity of sectors and contexts in which companies operate. Instead, they provide a foundation. We hope they can be built upon and refined to reflect the specific circumstances of different industries and geographies. And that, as practice matures and data availability and quality improve, the metrics can continue to evolve.

These metrics, which enjoy consensus across a range of groups working towards a just transition, represent the current state of the art. We believe they can bring clarity and value to all stakeholders: companies seeking to measure what matters, investors looking for decision-useful data, and standard-setters working to create consistency in disclosures.

Ultimately, using a common set of outcomes-focused metrics will enable companies, investors, and regulators to put people at the heart of the transition and help to ensure the success of their actions to address climate change.