Transition Plan Taskforce to become part of IFRS

Announcement paves the way for UK body’s guidance to form basis of future global standards on climate plans

The UK’s Transition Plan Taskforce (TPT) is to hand its guidance over to the IFRS Foundation, in a move that makes it likely it will become the basis of future global standards.

The IFRS Foundation, which oversees the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), announced today that it will “assume responsibility” for TPT’s output going forward.  

TPT was set up by the UK Government in 2021 to support regulators in the country who were grappling with what they should ask companies to report on when it came to their net-zero plans.  

In the intervening years, it has produced a series of guidance documents to help companies across all sectors of the economy understand how to produce a ‘gold standard’ transition plan.

The IFRS Foundation will initially host the documents on its own website, in a bid to signpost a greater number of companies to the guidance. Over time, it will use the guidance as the basis for its own educational materials, which help companies understand how to comply with the ISSB’s requirements.

Over the longer term, it is expected that the agreement will mean that TPT’s output is integrated into the ISSB standards themselves – namely IFRS S2, which focuses on climate, and already contains high-level requirements to disclose transition plans.

More than 20 jurisdictions have so far pledged to use the ISSB standards as a basis for national or regional disclosure rules.

Last month, the UK’s Department for Business and Trade appointed 14 people to a Sustainability Disclosure Technical Advisory Committee, tasked with helping it develop a UK-friendly version of the ISSB standards, ready for release in early 2025.

IFRS’s announcement today was made as part of a commitment from ISSB to “deliver further harmonisation and consolidation of the disclosure landscape in response to market demand”.

The EU’s advisory body, EFRAG, is currently developing guidance for the disclosure of transition plans under the bloc’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. A draft of those guidelines is expected to be released in July.