The idea of Just Transition is gaining traction across business, finance, and policy. Leaders increasingly recognize that managing the transition fairly—ensuring it benefits workers and communities, not just reduces emissions—is not only a social imperative, but increasingly a practical requirement for achieving climate goals themselves.

For many organizations, the challenge is no longer defining ambition but delivering it in practice. Key questions include what a Just Transition looks like on the ground, and how progress can be measured in a way that informs real decisions. Today, that challenge has a more concrete answer.

The Council for Inclusive Capitalism has been working to advance Just Transition since 2021, when a multi-stakeholder workstream with Boston Consulting Group (BCG), seven major energy and energy-intensive companies, investors and broader stakeholders produced the Just Transition Framework for Company Action—a practical structure for navigating workforce and community impacts. That work clarified what a Just Transition requires in practice, from workforce reskilling and job quality to community resilience and stakeholder engagement, while reinforcing that these issues are central to long-term value creation and trust.

Subsequent work with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and PwC surfaced emerging best practices through company case studies, while ongoing collaboration with WBCSD and BCG has focused on Financing the “Just” in Just Transition and the role of capital in enabling these outcomes.

Together, these efforts have brought Just Transition into real-world conversations through CEO, investor, policymakers and other stakeholder convenings, while consistently surfacing a critical challenge: companies are increasingly clear on what to do, but far less certain how to measure progress in a way that informs decisions. For investors, it limits the ability to evaluate whether transition strategies are credible and sustainable over the long term, particularly as expectations around social performance continue to evolve.

Shift, the leading center of expertise on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, has collaborated with the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, BSR, the Just Transition Finance Lab, the World Benchmarking Alliance, WBCSD, and the Council for Inclusive Capitalism on a foundational set of Just Transition metrics, which are now available for companies, financial institutions and standard setters.

This set of 19 sector-agnostic metrics can be used by investors, regulators and companies to assess whether businesses have identified and are addressing the risks and opportunities for people connected to their climate transition plans. The metrics offer a practical insight into the “justness” of companies’ climate-related transition plans and activities — covering three stakeholder groups: their own workforce, communities, and value chain workers.

For each, they move beyond measuring policies or commitments toward understanding outcomes: job security, reskilling and redeployment, living wages, worker voice, community consent, and supply chain impact assessment.

The metrics are intentionally designed to focus on data that companies can reasonably be expected to gather and disclose today. While they do not attempt to capture every possible scenario or sector-specific impact, they provide a practical foundation that businesses, regulators and standard setters can build on over time to reflect different industries, geographies and local transition contexts.

The effort is designed with the broader standards landscape in mind. Companies are already navigating a complex and evolving set of disclosure requirements, and adding new, unaligned metrics risks increasing fragmentation rather than driving progress. These metrics have been developed to complement existing frameworks, including GRI, and have been submitted as a formal input to the Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures (TISFD) as it develops its approach to social and inequality-related reporting.

The transition to a low-carbon and climate-resilient economy is already underway. The pace and durability of decarbonization efforts will increasingly depend on whether affected stakeholders are effectively integrated into transition planning and implementation, and whether the organizations driving that transition can demonstrate, in concrete terms, that they are getting it right.

These metrics represent a step toward that accountability. It is how commitments become credible, and how the transition earns the trust it will need to last.