London Climate Action Week 2026 provided the opportunity for the TPI Centre to discuss its work with practitioners and a wide range of stakeholders. Across public lectures, panels and workshops hosted at LSE and beyond, several themes recurred. Below are some highlights. 

Our public lecture, Net Zero Strategies: From commitments to accountability in the real economy, on 23 June set the tone for the week. Drawing on our new Net Zero Strategies assessments of the oil & gas and diversified mining sectors, the event, featuring company, investor and market-led policy perspectives (with Ipieca, Aberdeen and the UK Transition Finance Council on the panel) explored what distinguishes a credible transition plan from one that falls short, and why that distinction matters for both investors and companies making strategic long-term decisions. The discussion made clear that the tools and frameworks to assess transition plans are emerging, and that rigorous, independent assessment has a real role to play in helping capital flow toward companies with genuine decarbonisation strategies.

On 25 June, the TPI Centre chaired the "Aligning Capital with Corporate Transition Plans" panel at the World Climate Investment Summit, bringing together one of the largest UK asset owners, a Brazilian mining company, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) to discuss how investors are using transition plans in practice and what it would take to close the gap between commitment and action. The discussion emphasised that engagement is important for giving investors confidence in company management and visibility on transition progress but that this needs to be nuanced by investor type, as capital horizons differ between those operating in private versus public markets. A recording will be available here.

The two sets of parallel workshops we co-hosted at LSEG on 24 June with Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI), WBCSD and United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI), pointed to policy as a fundamental driver of transition planning and the area where greater consistency across jurisdictions would most help companies plan and investors commit with confidence. Political cycles create instability that makes long-term planning difficult, while the absence of agreed transition finance frameworks outside Europe leaves many markets without adequate tools. 

Participants, spanning investors, banks, companies and regulators, called for policy to provide a clearer long-term signal and for deeper public-private collaboration to make climate investment bankable, particularly in hard-to-abate sectors where the business case does not yet stand alone.

A recurring theme across the corporate-investor workshops was that the transition looks very different depending on where companies operate. Participants noted that frameworks designed for developed economies do not always translate to markets where fossil-fuel dependency is structurally embedded and called for greater consideration of regional context in transition planning metrics and frameworks.

This theme also played out on 24 June at LSE itself, where we were pleased to host a workshop by the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), which introduced a beta version of their new GeoDep tool to a select group of financial institutions. Building on their research on geographical dependencies in energy-intensive industries, GeoDep assesses the geographical dependencies of the industrial transition, exactly the kind of granular, regionally grounded analysis that practitioners said they need. We look forward to its public launch.

Our bank-investor workshops on 24 June examined dependencies in transition planning, five years on from COP26 in Glasgow. The sessions highlighted banks' role as enablers of the transition: by working with policymakers, public bodies and investors, banks can help address some of the dependencies of the transition to a low-carbon economy and make climate investment bankable.

That theme extended into 25 June, when the TPI Centre opened the Just Transition Finance Lab's (JTFL) Banking Spotlight event, examining how bank transition plans can embed just transition principles across climate-related financing. Bringing together Standard Bank Group, Lloyds and Standard Chartered, the discussion explored the role of international standard-setters, regulatory expectations and the practical challenges banks face in translating principles into action.

We are grateful to our collaborators, including TPI, WBCSD, UNEP FI, LSEG, WCF, EU JRC and JTFL, and to all the speakers, participants and attendees who contributed to such a rich week of dialogue. 

To learn more about our research, assessments and data tools, please visit www.transitionpathwayinitiative.org. You can also subscribe here to stay up to date with our latest work.


Photo by kazuend on Unsplash