Finance

Principles of Integrated Capitals Assessments

This guide from the Capitals Coalition can help you make more holistic capitals assessments by accounting for natural, human, and social capital. It is designed to promote more consistency in how capital assessments are conducted. The first section outlines the spectrum capitals assessments, from ‘single capital assessments’ to ‘multi-capital assessments’ through to ‘integrated capitals assessments. The second section provides a five-principle framework designed to support the use of integrated capitals assessments. This guide will be most useful to sustainability and finance departments.

Integrated Decision-Making Framework

Often, direct financial impacts are prioritised in decision-making, while other impacts, such as those related to nature and society, are not considered to the same extent, despite being equally real and tangible. The Integrated Decision-Making Framework provides a roadmap for considering and navigating the landscape of our planet's intersecting natural, social, human, and produced capital, and for embedding the values of these four capitals into all decision-making.

The Integrated Decision-Making Framework provides a practical approach for an integrated capitals assessment with a clear governance structure. It features detailed technical guidance for practitioners, and is aimed to support them in preparing capitals information for decision-making. Currently, the Framework is comprised of three key resources: the Capitals Protocol, Governance for Valuation, and A Primer on Integrated Decision-Making. To help you value four capitals systemically into decisions, the Capitals Protocol provides seven iterative steps for integrated decision-making. These steps form the backbone of an integrated capitals assessment, and are organised in three stages: Assemble, Assess, and Act. Governance for Valuation increases transparency and consistency in valuation, building on four blocks to drive confidence in decision-making: transparency requirements, confidence criteria, value notes, and attribution scopes. Additionally, the Primer on Integrated Decision-Making offers a high-level introduction to the purpose, structure, and available technical guidance that the Integrated Decision-Making Framework provides.

A4S Essential Guide: Strategic Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting

In a changing world where the long-term economic, social, and environmental outlook is tremendously complex and uncertain, it has become increasingly difficult to respond to emergent trends. This guide from A4S was designed to improve decision-making and risk management by providing finance teams with tools, practical examples, and guidance on how to integrate sustainability into strategic planning, budgeting, and forecasting.

A4S Essential Guide to Valuations and Climate Change

Understanding and assessing climate change impacts is critical to determining the value of businesses and making sound investment decisions. This guide from A4S features a five-step framework to help investors and valuators incorporate climate change risks and opportunities into valuations, and includes case studies and practical advice on performing valuation analysis.

Win-Win-Win: The Sustainable Supply Chain Finance Opportunity

This report from BSR highlights mechanisms - such as sustainable trade loans and smart contract solutions - that will help you to leverage supply chain finance to incentivize and scale sustainable behaviour among your suppliers.

Financial innovation for SME net zero transition: Role of banks and buyers

This report from University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) and BSR explains how you can decarbonise your value chain by supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It covers four potential solutions to the common barriers SMEs face in reaching net zero, including a diagnostic tool to assess SME climate readiness; a shared repository for SME sustainability data; SME decarbonisation roadmaps; and a net zero support services marketplace. This guidance will be most useful to external facing teams, including procurement and supply chain management, as well as your sustainability team.

How to Talk to Your CFO About Sustainability

This article explains how to use the five-step Return on Sustainability Investment (ROSI) method to help CFOs make the connection between financial performance and sustainability. This resource will especially benefit change agents who are trying to show how proposed sustainability acitivities will meet ROI imperatives.

Broadening the horizon: How CFOs and Finance Functions can help drive corporate sustainability

This guide from the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) can help you understand how finance teams can adapt and develop to fill their essential role in corporate sustainability transformation. It outlines the growing expectations for businesses to shift their focus from delivering financial performance for shareholders to delivering long-term wellbeing for people and the planet; explains the implications of this shift for businesses (and, specifically, for the corporate finance function); and highlights key enablers of transformation that will support finance functions in adapting to this changing environment. These insights will be most useful to CFOs and finance professionals.

Advancing the S in ESG: A primer for CFOs

This primer from WBCSD, in partnership with Shift Project and the CFO Network, is designed to introduce CFOs to social sustainability and why it is essential to their role. Part one provides overview of the what, who, and how of corporate social performance, and part two shares key insights from CFOs on how to better measure social performance.

Sustainable Finance Primer Series

This series of primers from the Institute for Sustainable Finance offers succinct introductions to common sustainable finance topics and tools. They cover over 20, including transition bonds, climate risk, and financed emissions. Each primer provides a breakdown of the topic definition, its importance, and its challenges, and while the primers give special attention to the Canadian context, the insights offered are broadly applicable. This resource will be most useful to finance teams and others seeking to orient themselves to the financial sustainability landscape.

Biodiversity Finance Reference Guide

The IFC has developed this guide to help you to better understand project eligibility criteria for biodiversity finance, as well as some of the more common project types. The guide builds on the Green Bond Principles and the Green Loan Principles and highlights different types of investment projects, activities, and components that help protect, maintain, or enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services, as well as promote the sustainable management of natural resources. This is a good resource for identifying opportunities to address the key drivers of biodiversity loss in your production practices; to integrate nature-based solutions into their operations; and to develop nature conservation activities.

Reporting Insights: Sustainability Data Collection

This brief from Accounting for Sustainability (A4S) can help you to better obtain timely, complete, and accurate sustainability data. It identifies key questions and key elements that can help you to ensure robust sustainability data collection, and provides detailed information and practical actions for finance teams on four essential data-related "areas": information quality and control environment, technology and automation, data sources, and assurance.

The TPI Tool

Created by the Transition Pathway Initiative, the TPI tool can help you to assess the alignment of your investments with the goals of the Paris Agreement. This corporate climate action benchmark assesses how prepared companies are for the transition to a low-carbon economy. Using publicly disclosed company information, the TPI tool evaluates and tracks companies based on two dimensions: the quality of companies’ management of their greenhouse gas emissions and of risks and opportunities related to the low-carbon transition, and how companies’ planned or expected future carbon performance compares to international targets and national pledges made as part of the Paris Agreement.

The Transition Pathway Initiative also publishes discussion papers, explainers, reports, and carbon performance assessments for numerous sectors and industries, among other resources.