This edition focuses on the infrastructure of accountability — what it takes to make the Just Transition measurable, credible, and built to last.
From the Founder
Dear Friends and Fellow Members,
Last month around the world, people celebrated Earth Day under the theme “Our Power, Our Planet” — a rallying cry for communities to reclaim their voice in shaping the transitions that will define our collective future.
“Our Power” has a meaning that goes deeper than energy policy. It speaks to the people who have powered our economies for generations: workers in industrial communities, employees of energy companies, and union members who built the middle class, yet now face an uncertain horizon. Their work, skills, and trust are what any successful transition will ultimately depend on.
Reflecting on this, I am reminded of words spoken by my friend and longtime collaborator Sharan Burrow, former General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), at the Council’s Davos event during the 2022 World Economic Forum. Sharan puts it with characteristic directness: “There are no jobs on a dead planet.” She’s right. But the reverse is equally true and urgent: there is no viable transition on a planet that abandons its workers and their access to affordable energy. This intersection is where the concept of Just Transition originally emerged—not in climate policy, but in worker voice—as a call to ensure that people bearing the cost of environmental progress aren’t left behind.
This is not a future concern. The just transition is playing out right now, around the world, and the infrastructure to support it is being built in real time. That makes the alignment of business leaders, investors, and policymakers not a peripheral concern, but a central challenge for economic growth.
The question is not whether to act, but whether the infrastructure exists to make that action measurable, credible, and built to last.
Onward together,
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Founder and CEO
From the Archive
Hear Sharan Burrow and fellow Council partners make the case for workers at the heart of the just transition — live from Davos, 2022.
Insights
Making the Just Transition Measurable
The shift to a low-carbon economy must work for workers and communities — not only as a social imperative, but as a practical requirement for achieving climate goals. Community opposition, workforce disruption, and supply chain fragility can all derail transition plans that fail to account for people.
A new set of 19 sector-agnostic Just Transition metrics from Shift and collaborating organizations — including the Council — gives companies, investors, and regulators a tool to measure whether that’s actually happening. Read how we got here, and what it means in practice.
Council for Inclusive Capitalism ally and Just Transition Metrics collaborator, the World Benchmarking Alliance, is developing a new Integrated Transition Assessment — a framework designed to define what credible, connected corporate action on climate, nature, and people actually looks like. As part of that process, WBA is running global consultations to ensure the assessment reflects the priorities of companies, investors, policymakers, and civil society. This is an opportunity to contribute your perspective before the framework is set.
A new framework finds that the international systems designed to support a just transition are, in many cases, actively reproducing the barriers they claim to address. Drawing on country briefs from Chile, Indonesia, Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, and Vietnam, author Steven J. Harry identifies seven recurring patterns — from climate finance that sidelines social protection, to consultation processes that satisfy procedural requirements without transferring real decision-making power, to green supply chains that replicate extraction dynamics under new branding. The report argues these aren’t isolated national failures but structural ones, rooted in historical relationships between Global South countries and global finance, trade, and governance systems — and proposes five concrete actions for the multilateral system to address them ahead of COP31.
Scotland’s Just Transition Commission — one of the first bodies of its kind in the world — concludes its four-year term with a clear verdict: progress has fallen short. While the country has put building blocks in place, including sector plans, place-based funding, and a nascent monitoring framework, the dominant pattern has been reactive crisis management rather than proactive planning. The Commission points to industrial site closures handled after the fact, stalled energy strategies, and a market-led trajectory that risks leaving workers and households behind. Its 30 recommendations call for anticipatory place-based planning, a credible joint plan for the North Sea workforce, stronger skills infrastructure, community ownership of renewable energy, and justice-aligned investment conditionalities — all underpinned by independent, permanent scrutiny. The core message: a just transition is still possible, but it requires courageous action across sectors and government to use every lever it has, starting now.
Where We’ll Be
If you’re in the New York area, this one is worth your evening.
Our friends at Conscious Capitalism NYC are hosting an intimate leadership conversation on May 21 featuring Michael Gelb — whose work with Raj Sisodia on The Healing Organization makes the case that human-centered businesses don’t just do good, they outperform — and Art Kleiner, co-author of The AI Dilemma and one of the sharper minds working on responsible AI in practice.
The evening is designed around the questions we don’t ask enough: How do we lead with integrity when trust is eroding and the pace of change is relentless? What does it actually mean to navigate AI-driven disruption with humanity intact?
These are questions the Council community thinks about every day. If you’re in New York and want to be in the room with people who take them seriously, this is a good place to be.
May 19, 2026
