How to use the Roadmap
This Roadmap is designed to help you to integrate people-centered considerations into the climate decisions you're already making, rather than as a separate process to manage. It translates this integrated approach into milestones across six business domains and four maturity levels, helping you identify where you are today and plan where to focus next.
- Assess where you stand today across six business domains.
- Identify and plan for your next milestone for any of the business domains.
- Browse the tools, resources and case studies most relevant to reaching that milestone.
- Put your actions into practice.
The aim is for you to gradually advance the integration of people-centered considerations across all six domains reaching the relevant milestones for your business.
The Roadmap at a glance: where to integrate people-centered considerations across business domains and maturity levels, with illustrative milestones
Business domains
The Roadmap is structured across six business domains where people-centered considerations can be built into climate decisions. Use them to assess where in your organization, integration would add most value, and why it matters.
Governance
Embedding ‘just’ or people-centered transition responsibilities into board structures and executive mandates, with clear ownership and cross-functional collaboration across sustainability, operations, HR, procurement and finance.
Strategy
Ensuring that impacts on workers, communities, supply chains and consumers, including those heightened by features of the company's business model, shape strategic choices and transition trade-offs from the outset, rather than being considered only after key decisions are made.
Risk Management
Identifying and prioritizing risks to people arising from decarbonization, adaptation, offsetting measures, as well as physical climate impacts and managing them through the company's enterprise risk process with the same discipline applied to other material business risks.
Operations
Delivering the people-related actions in the company's climate plans, such as workforce transitions and supplier engagement, health & safety and site-level changes and tracking and publicly reporting on progress and outcomes for people.
Capital Allocation
Linking people impacts to investment appraisal, capex approval and asset phase-in/phase-out decisions so that social costs and benefits associated with the climate transition carry weight in decision-making.
Stakeholder Engagement
Building meaningful engagement with affected stakeholders, including through feedback and grievance mechanisms, while collaborating with wider stakeholders and engaging in responsible policy advocacy to strengthen the credibility, legitimacy and durability of climate action.
Maturity levels
The Roadmap sets out four maturity levels to help you assess where you are now identify practical next steps to advance your approach. There is no prescribed sequence: you can progress at different rates across domains, starting or advancing where it makes most sense for your current context, priorities and existing capabilities.
01 Beginning
Impacts on people are considered in climate-related decisions on an adhoc and reactive basis, without a structured approach.
02 Developing
Impacts on people are considered in specific climate-related plans or actions (e.g., priority risks, investments, sites, or stakeholders), but not yet systematically across decision-making.
03 Established
Impacts on people are consistently considered across core climate-related plans and actions, and systematically embedded in decision-making across functions.
04 Leading
Impacts on people are fully integrated into climate-plans and actions, which are regularly reviewed and refined based on outcomes, stakeholder feedback (including through grievance mechanisms) and implementation experience, with clear accountability at senior level.
Conditions for effective action
Progress across the domains and maturity levels above depends on a set of enabling conditions. Without these in place, even well-designed strategies, plans and programs struggle to translate into action:
- Awareness & understanding: People across the organization understand what a ‘just’ or people-centered transition means and why it's relevant to their specific role and decisions.
- Capability: Teams have the technical skills, tools, and expertise needed to identify, assess, and act on people-related transition impacts.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Sustainability, finance, procurement, operations, HR, risk management, and strategy functions coordinate so that decisions in one domain account for impacts surfaced in another, breaking down silos that often keep functions acting independently.
- Data & information infrastructure: The organization can access disaggregated data on workforce, supplier, and community exposure, to support monitoring and evaluation, enabling informed decision-making.
- Resourcing: Budget and headcount exist to act on ‘just’ or people-centered transition responsibilities, distinct from simply assigning them on paper and resourcing reflects a long-term time horizon, rather than being crowded out by short-term financial pressures that favor quick wins over systemic investment.
- Governance. Embedding ‘just’ or people-centered transition responsibilities into board structures and executive mandates, with clear ownership and cross-functional collaboration across sustainability, operations, HR, procurement and finance.
- Strategy. Ensuring that the company’s business model and strategy are aligned to climate transition objectives that explicitly address workforce, community, supply chain and consumer impacts.
- Risk Management. Integrating people-centered considerations into risk management systems and processes, including impact assessments to surface people-related risks and opportunities alongside climate.
- Operations. Managing product and service delivery and innovation, workforce transition, supplier relationships and place-based implementation in ways that respect people’s livelihoods and build resilience throughout markets, operations and the value chain.
- Capital Allocation. Linking people impacts to investment appraisal, capex approval and asset phase-in/phase-out decisions so that social costs and benefits associated with the climate transition carry weight in financial decision-making.
- Stakeholder Engagement. Building the stakeholder relationships, feedback mechanisms (including grievance processes), and collaborations that make transition plans credible, legitimate, and durable.