Cross-Sector Partnership
Transition
Valuation Project
Scaling Investments in Just Transitions by Valuing What People Need
Accelerating transitions, while aiming to achieve net zero, must be rooted in the needs of society and nature. This means that health - human and planetary - or jobs - growth and quality - should be at the heart of just transitions. Citizens, through pension funds and multilateral development banks, can play a major role if corporate transition plans are valued by what people need for a just transition.
That’s why, as our flagship project, we are focusing on understanding and addressing the valuation issues that are preventing greater progress in the global transition to net zero and the Sustainable Development Goals. There’s growing pressure on companies to develop credible transition plans that show how they manage climate, nature, and social risks and opportunities.
The Challenge
Every company must navigate the transition towards net zero and sustainable development goals. Across sectors, progress varies widely - from those yet to take meaningful action, to leaders with fully articulated governance structures, net zero targets and published transition plans with commitments to capital expenditure. The Transition Pathway Initiative’s staircase model illustrates this range.
However, even the most committed organisations are not moving fast enough. One critical reason is that capital is not flowing at the speed required to finance transition initiatives in a crucial way:
aligning capital expenditure with ambitious transition plans.
Purpose of the TVP
The Transition Valuation Project (TVP) tackles this challenge by diagnosing the underlying valuation and decision-making issues that block capital flows into credible SDG-aligned transition plans. It will focus on understanding both from a financial and an impact perspective:
Key decision-makers across organisations - investors, corporate boards, development banks, pension funds other capital allocators - who influence transition finance.
Core challenges - including data and information gaps, systemic blockages, regulatory or fiduciary constraints, and market alignment issues.
Potential solutions – human-centered design of emerging systems ranging from standards, frameworks, market mechanisms, governance models, and measurement and valuation methodologies.
The TVP Steering Committee
Mathis Wackernagel
Dr. Mathis Wackernagel created the footprint concept in the early 1990s, with his Ph.D. advisor Prof. William E. Rees, to compare human demand against planetary or regional ecosystem regeneration. This tool allows researchers to track global overshoot and countries’ ecological deficit. The carbon footprint portion has become the most popular footprint variant. In 2003, he founded Global Footprint Network, a sustainability think-tank, making planetary constraints relevant to decision-making. Its largest engagement campaign is its annual Earth Overshoot Day.
Mathis’s main interest is how to turn overshoot into a magnet that motivates, rather than an “inconvenient truth” that triggers resistance. While Mathis is mostly interested in engaging with what is afore, he can also bicycle backwards. Mathis’s honors include the 2024 Nobel Trust Award, two medals of merit from the Colombian parliament, the 2018 World Sustainability Award, the 2015 IAIA Global Environment Award, and the 2012 Blue Planet Prize, the 2011 Zayed International Prize for the Environment, three honorary degrees, and a Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. Mathis is also a full member of the Club of Rome.
Teresa Nielsen
Teresa Nielsen is the Head of Crisis Simulation for Authorities at Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority. She is a senior manager with 10+ years of expertise working with her peers and executives, leading matrix groups across business divisions and functions. She has successfully delivered the design for Sustainability Impact Accounting, the FINMA required Group ICAAP, Project Rigi, and the UBS Global Resolution Strategy. Teresa has more than 8+ years’ experience as sell-side equity and credit analyst for the banking sector which has allowed her to aquire a profound understanding of the financial markets, the banking sector and a holistic knowledge about each division of the bank.
Melissa McDonald
Melissa McDonald is an experienced non-executive director, board adviser and investment governance specialist with over 35 years’ experience in asset management, fiduciary oversight and sustainable finance. She has held senior leadership roles at HSBC Asset Management, AXA Investment Managers and MSCI, where she was responsible for investment process design, product development, risk management and ESG integration across asset classes. Melissa has served as a director of HSBC ETF plc, HSBC Global Asset Management (UK) Ltd, HSBC Pollination Climate Asset Management Ltd and the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association.
She has also played an active role in industry initiatives such as the One Planet Sovereign Wealth Fund initiative, the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership’s Investment Leaders Group and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. Through her advisory firm, PositiveEdge Consultants Ltd, she supports organisations working with asset owners, including UK pension schemes, on investment strategy, stewardship frameworks and transition planning. She has a long-standing commitment to using robust investment processes and governance to align capital with climate and nature goals. As a member of the Greenings Transition Valuation Project Steering Committee, her work focuses on making impact and transition valuation tools decision-useful for boards and investment committees.
Pavan Sukhdev
Pavan is a scientist by education, an international banker by training, and an environmental economist by passion. He previously led (2008-2011) the United Nations’ Green Economy Initiative and The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) study.
As Founder and CEO of GIST Impact, a leader in sustainability data and analytics which works across the domains of sustainability, machine learning and artificial intelligence to discover a business's full value contribution to the world, Pavan works with leading corporations and investors worldwide, harnessing the power of impact economics and technology to discover a business's full value contribution to the world.
Pavan was awarded the McCluskey Fellowship (2011) by Yale University, where he taught a graduate course on TEEB and wrote his book “Corporation 2020: Transforming Business for Tomorrow’s World.” He is a former President and Chair of WWF International (2018-2021) and has served on the boards of Conservation International , the Global Reporting Initiative and the Stockholm Resilience Centre. His work on the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity and on corporate sustainability metrics has been recognised through several awards, including the Blue Planet Prize (2016), the Tyler Prize (2020) and the EAERE European Practitioner Achievement Award in Applying Environmental Economics (2024).
Dr. Céline Bilolo
Dr. Céline Bilolo is the Chief Sustainability Officer at TÜV SÜD.
We’re proud to collaborate with some of the most trusted and innovative providers of impact valuation solutions.
Why this matters
Institutional investors—like pension funds, insurers, sovereign wealth funds, and development finance institutions need confidence that transition plans are:
Viable – capable of delivering on stated net zero commitments.
Feasible & Realistic – realistic and executable given organisational and sectoral context.
Accurately Valued / Priced – such that enterprise valuations reflect SDG-aligned
Research suggests that uncertainty and a lack of confidence around the valuation of corporate transitions are constraining capital flows, slowing organisational progress and overall SDG-aligned transitions.
Our work is guided by our sprint and usability approach to collaborate on innovative approaches, such as evaluating health outcomes of blended capital flows into infrastructure.
Source: IPCC AR6, Chapter 18:
What the project delivers
Map the landscape of roles and responsibilities influencing SDG-aligned transition valuations.
Define and prioritise barriers that are slowing capital flows
Highlight solutions—including impact valuation and measurement—where relevant, once problems are clearly diagnosed.
Develop and publish practical recommendations and pathways to build market confidence in SDG-aligned transition valuations.
How we can collaborate
We work with partner organisations to learn and advance the valuation of capital flows in terms of their positive and negative impacts on SDG-aligned transitions to net zero.
Private and Public Pension Funds:
Our focus is to understand and address the decision journey and information needs for investing pension capital in assets and companies, with regard to their transition pathways and their ambition, management and performance.
Multilateral Development Finance Institutions:
Our focus is to understand and address the decision journey and information needs for financing the just transition and implementation of policies for job growth and quality in public infrastructure and private market investments.
All System Participants:
To achieve the goals of the TVP, we work with all participants in the system - from beneficiary representatives, NGOs, government agencies, asset managers and solution providers.
