How To Map the Transition Footprint of a Company

The document outlines a granular, asset-level process for financial institutions (FIs) to map a company's transition footprint. This process involves five key steps: assessing double materiality to prioritize business lines, gathering detailed asset-level data, identifying retrofit and retirement timelines, selecting appropriate transition benchmarks (such as NDCs or peer data), and evaluating the resulting transition exposure. The guide emphasizes that moving beyond high-level emissions disclosures to asset-specific analysis allows FIs to identify carbon lock-in, policy misalignment, and opportunities for early retirement of high-emissions assets.

• Transition footprint mapping is defined as a granular process of assessing a company's assets, activities, and geographic operations to determine where its business is most exposed to the energy transition and the associated risks and opportunities.
• The first step in the mapping process is a double materiality assessment, which evaluates both the financial materiality of assets to the company and the company's environmental impact, primarily through emissions.
• Effective asset-level data gathering requires capturing specific features for each asset, including production volume, emissions intensity, retirement dates, contractual or policy constraints, and equity ownership share.
• Determining asset retirement and retrofit timelines requires cross-referencing company-reported schedules, technical cycles (e.g., blast furnace relining every 20 years), contractual structures like Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs), and policy drivers such as coal phase-out targets.
• FIs should use a variety of benchmarks to evaluate transition exposure, including Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), regional policy-driven pathways, technology roadmaps, and peer company data.
• Comparing asset timelines against benchmarks allows FIs to identify carbon lock-in and policy risks, which can then be used to engage companies on early retirement of high-emissions assets or pivoting investment pipelines toward low-carbon alternatives.

APA

McKinnon, A., Barton, H., & White, T. (2025). How To Map the Transition Footprint of a Company. RMI. https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2025/12/rmi-how-to-map-the-transition-footprint-of-a-company.pdf?utm_source=email&utm_medium=outreach&utm_campaign=transition_pathway_launch

Chicago

McKinnon, Aubrey, Hannah Barton, and Thomas White. How To Map the Transition Footprint of a Company. RMI, 2025. https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2025/12/rmi-how-to-map-the-transition-footprint-of-a-company.pdf?utm_source=email&utm_medium=outreach&utm_campaign=transition_pathway_launch.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=McKinnon |first1=Aubrey |last2=Barton |first2=Hannah |last3=White |first3=Thomas |title=How To Map the Transition Footprint of a Company |publisher=RMI |date=December 2025 |url=https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2025/12/rmi-how-to-map-the-transition-footprint-of-a-company.pdf?utm_source=email&utm_medium=outreach&utm_campaign=transition_pathway_launch |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{mckinnon2025how, author = {McKinnon, Aubrey and Barton, Hannah and White, Thomas}, title = {{How To Map the Transition Footprint of a Company}}, institution = {RMI}, year = {2025}, month = dec, url = {https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2025/12/rmi-how-to-map-the-transition-footprint-of-a-company.pdf?utm_source=email&utm_medium=outreach&utm_campaign=transition_pathway_launch}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }