In aligning to the TCFD recommendations, you will be (amongst many things) required to describe the managements role in assessing and managing climate-related risks and opportunities. This point can be split into 4 key areas.

1. Assigning of climate-related responsibilities.

2. Describing the organisational structure.

3. Process of informing management.

4. Managements process for monitoring.

Many organisations today will be assessing against the 4 points above. They would then populate the descriptions in an external standard’s framework and most likely achieve a high score. Of course, this information will also be illustrated in their disclosures.

In our TCFD Alignment maturity assessment you will see each point has been scaled into 6 individual areas of maturity bringing a degree of precision to your Sustainable Development. Accordingly, to address the above 4 points we would audit your TCFD alignment against 24 validation statements, putting your organisation in a very strong position in front of asset owners. We won’t simply interview you and tick off against 4 points only for you to end up topping the greenwash ranking charts for your sector.

As an example, let us consider point 3 above. I have chosen point 3 because we have seen this heavily conflated with point 4 into one set of results. This is because the process to inform management is not the same as the managements process to monitor climate related issues. Not only are they distinct in process, but they are also in quantitative measures. The picture below will give you an example of our key measures for point number 3 above.

You can read the full argument for a TCFD alignment maturity assessment here where you will also understand the fragility and risks of following the TCFD recommendations at face value only.

We will soon be training consultants and organisations on becoming qualified in this assessment tool, so please do follow us on linkedin @sustainablefactors for an announcement when the training courses go live in 2022. Otherwise just reach out to me informally here if you would like to get your organisation assessed. By all means, feed back to me on which statements above are true for your organisation.