Financing the transition: expanding opportunity sets, shifting investor approaches

Asset owners remain anchored to long-term net zero objectives and reiterate climate risk transparency as a cornerstone of fiduciary duty. Against a challenging geopolitical and policy backdrop, many are reassessing what credible progress looks like in practice and how to allocate capital to enable the transition to stay on track across the real economy.

The central question for discussion is whether we are at an inflection point: to what extent are institutional investors moving away from temperature-anchored interim targets and towards a more bottom-up approach that is grounded in sector and issuer transition pathways, engagement and real-economy outcomes, while staying firmly on a net zero destination?

We explore how widely this shift is occurring, what is driving it and what it changes in terms of risk assessment, opportunity identification and the practical inputs investors need to act with confidence, particularly in hard-to-abate sectors. The roundtable convenes asset owners, asset managers, data and ratings providers and policy-makers to compare signals from the market and pressure-test where consensus is emerging (and where it is not).

The discussion examines what enables capital to flow at scale into credible transition opportunities – such as realistic, transparent company-wide transition plans; decision-useful metrics beyond portfolio labels; and policy and market guidance that supports long-term investment horizons. We also consider how labelled and transition-labelled debt markets are evolving as issuers from a wider range of sectors come to market.