Assessing and validating corporate low-carbon transition strategies: a comparative analysis of approaches and methodologies

Independent assessments and validations of corporate low-carbon transition strategies offer valuable insights for investors, policymakers and other stakeholders. However, there is a limited understanding of how individual methodologies cover key policy-relevant transition components underlying their assessment outputs and methodological differences. This lack of clarity may hinder the integration of established methods into policies aimed at advancing corporate climate accountability as well as progress within the assessment field. To address this gap, this article analyses the methodological design choices of ten corporate low-carbon transition strategy assessments with publicly available methodologies and results. These include the Science BasedTtargets initiative and the Transition Pathways Initiative. We develop a two-part framework to compare the assessment setup and the coverage of key transition strategy components and illustrate the differences, using the assessment outcomes for a major global company. Our findings help policymakers navigate the heterogeneity in key methodological parameters, notably in component coverage, the assessment approach per strategy component and weighting. We show that no single assessment initiative provides fully up-to-date, contextualized evaluations of all transition strategy components for more than 1000 companies, noting this as a key limitation. However, composite assessments, which integrate multiple assessments as sources, are emerging to address gaps in criteria coverage while maintaining contextualized assessment for each criterion. We propose a centralized repository to track and compare assessment methodologies, supporting an understanding of methodological variances and synergies between initiatives. Finally, this article provides the foundation for further research on sector-specific methodological differences and on aligning assessment methodologies with emerging global standards.