As part of managing the risks and opportunities presented by climate change, investors around the world are increasingly managing their exposure to transition and physical risk associated with their investment portfolios, which includes sovereign debt.
As the first tool of its kind, ASCOR provides independently and academically rigorous information to help investors assess how sovereigns are managing climate risks and opportunities and to stimulate greater transparency between issuers, financial institutions, and relevant stakeholders.
Meet our partners
To reveal a Partner's profile, hover over their logo:
Academic partner:
Academic partner:
Academic partners:
The ASCOR tool identifies the most critical and publicly available climate data points to support investors in sovereign debt financial analysis, thus reducing for sovereign issuers uncertainty around what information is needed and material to investor decision making.
ASCOR’s methodology and third-party assessments are publicly available and, in understanding what investors wish to learn, issuers can share relevant, climate-change related information.
The ASCOR Initiative was established by investors to better inform decision making and dialogue between investors and debt issuers. The Initiative partnered with the LSE TPI Centre as the academic research expert to create the methodology and undertake the annual data assessments. The results enable improved dialogue and understanding. ASCOR though is not an engagement initiative: how investors and other groups choose to use ASCOR data is up to them.
ASCOR data can help to open communication channels and facilitate greater dialogue between private investors and sovereign bond issuers, enabling issuers to demonstrate their climate change progress more easily over time, attract additional investment, and build trust.
Through clarity and transparency, the ASCOR Initiative has the potential to build investor confidence in governments’ climate change approaches, and support building more resilient approaches to the risk posed by climate change.
The ASCOR Explainer Series provides an overview of how sovereign climate-related risks and opportunities are assessed in the ASCOR framework. The series consists of 14 videos and accompanying slides. The video explainers were produced and recorded by the ASCOR team at the TPI Centre, Camila Cristancho Duarte, Setenay Hizliok, Johannes Honneth, Sylvan Lutz, Giorgia Monsignori and Antonina Scheer, with the introduction video featuring ASCOR co-chairs, Claudia Gollmeier, Colchester Global Investors and Esther Law, Amundi Asset Management.
Investors came together as an Initiative to develop a methodology to assess how countries were addressing climate change and the transition, to identify the key information sources needed to inform investor decision making. The Initiative approached the LSE TPI Centre as an independent academic institution that could lead the development of the methodology and resulting assessments.
We published the ASCOR Consultation Report, explaining the overall framework (now methodology), and launched a public survey seeking to obtain feedback. In parallel, we convened virtual and in-person regional roundtables between investors and sovereign debt issuers to generate greater insights.
The TPI Centre conducted assessments of an initial 25 countries and shared respective results with sovereign issuer representatives for feedback.
The TPI Centre published the ASCOR report and the pilot country assessments.
The ASCOR Tool was launched with a webinar where we introduced the background to the project and framework (methodology). The first set of assessments from 25 countries were presented and there was a discussion from asset owners, asset managers and sovereign issuers on how the tool will benefit their understanding of the risks and opportunities.
A webinar was held on the user cases for ASCOR, discussing with market participants how they are using the ASCOR assessments. A progress note, announcing our intention to expand coverage to 70 countries, was also published.
The first State of Transition in Sovereigns 2024: Tracking National Climate Action was published for investors, that took coverage up to 70 countries. Coverage will increase further in 2025.
The ASCOR Project is led by asset owners, asset managers and supported by international investor networks. ASCOR is co-chaired by Victoria Barron (founding capacity), Esther Law, Amundi, Claudia Gollmeier, Colchester Global Investors, and Adam Matthews, Church of England Pensions Board. ASCOR was established with the support of the UN-convened Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance (AOA), Ceres, the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC), the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), and Sura Asset Management. The project is also advised by Chronos Sustainability.
ASCOR’s academic research expert is the Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI) Centre, based at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
The ASCOR Investor Advisory Committee consists of AIGCC, Allspring Global Investments, Amundi, Ceres, Chronos Sustainability, Church of England Pensions Board, Colchester Global Investors, IGCC, IIGCC, Insight Investments, MFS, Ninety One and PRI. For more information on the Committee, contact us.
To progress the ASCOR Initiative to the next phase of development a decision was taken at the end of 2024 to incorporate ASCOR into the Transition Pathway Initiative Limited (TPIL). TPIL comprises a Board (with representatives of various asset owners), under the Board is the TPI Strategic Advisory Committee (made up of the investor networks, asset owners, FTSE Russell and TPI Centre representatives plus 2 investment managers), the Research Funding Partner Council (made up of 7 investment managers) and now the ASCOR Investor Advisory Committee.TPIL feeds into the TPI Centre with representation on the TPI Centre Advisory Board and Resource and Development Committee. For more information on TPIL governance click here.
Country assessments will be updated annually. The assessment date for each country is noted on the ASCOR tool.
The current coverage of the ASCOR tool as of December 2024 is 70 countries. The plan is to expand further in 2025.
The ASCOR framework and tool are for illustrative non-commercial research and educational purposes. If you would like to use ASCOR data in any other manner, including for commercial purposes, you will need the LSE TPI Centre’s written permission. In this regard, please email all inquiries to: gri.ascor@lse.ac.uk. For further information on the terms of use for the ASCOR tool, please consult the disclaimer.
Unless otherwise specified in the indicator methodology, assessments for ASCOR are undertaken using in-depth policy research drawing on public government documents. In the case of most quantitative metrics and some indicators, third-party data sources are used. Most relevant datasets are published under a Creative Commons licence; others require dedicated licensing agreements. All third-party data providers and their respective Terms & Conditions are listed in the References section of the ASCOR methodology note.
The majority of the ASCOR framework is composed of qualitative ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ questions with the aim of providing investors and other stakeholders with clearly interpretable performance indicators. The assessment of these binary indicators requires in-depth and complex policy analysis. To supplement the binary indicators, quantitative metrics are also included in the ASCOR tool, using third-party data providers or quantitative analysis. These quantitative metrics serve as contextual information on the progress countries are making towards meeting their targets and implementing their policies.
The ASCOR tool does not aggregate assessment results into a single composite country ‘score’. As such, there is no weighting of the different indicators and metrics. The ASCOR tool shows each indicator result transparently as a dashboard, allowing users to compare countries on each indicator. The only aggregation analysis in the ASCOR tool is at the thematic area level. The result for an area is ‘Yes’ if all indicators within an area are assessed as ‘Yes’; ‘Partial’ if some of the indicators are assessed as ‘Yes’; and ‘No’ if all of the indicators are assessed as ‘No’.
The approach of not defining weightings or providing a score was specifically chosen as it lets investors choose how they would like to use the data.
The ASCOR tool assesses the full range of climate risks and opportunities including both transition risk and physical risk. On the latter, it specifically evaluates how countries are managing physical risk by assessing the presence, comprehensiveness and implementation of adaptation policies. The ASCOR tool does not include physical risk metrics that directly measure exposure to climate hazards.
The ASCOR project has been led by asset owners, asset managers, and investor networks since its inception in 2021. These stakeholders participated in the development of the ASCOR framework and tool.
In early 2023, a consultation process was held to gather feedback on the initial ASCOR framework. The TPI Centre collected feedback through an online survey from a broad range of stakeholders, including governments, investors, investor networks, banks, academia, civil society, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the wider public. In addition, the ASCOR project partners convened virtual global webinars and regional roundtables with investor and country representatives in North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. ASCOR also held consultation meetings with key organisations including the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), International Finance Corporation (IFC), International Monetary Fund (IMF), Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) and World Bank as well as with selected national Debt Management Offices and Ministries of Environment to understand country-specific perspectives. The modifications made to the final ASCOR framework based on consultation feedback are described in Appendix 3 of the ASCOR methodology note.
ASCOR believes that the openness and breadth of this consultation exercise, and the fact that the methodologies are now open source, adds to the credibility of the assessment process.
The ASCOR tool is an open source, publicly available independent assessment framework that evaluates countries on their progress managing the low-carbon transition and the impacts of climate change. It is not an accounting framework, such as the one developed by the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF), which help investors to measure and account for their financed and facilitated emissions but complements it. The ASCOR tool fills a market gap by assessing the points of highest importance to investors with respect to sovereign climate performance, therefore enhancing the resources available to investors to enhance their investment analysis.
ASCOR doesn’t tell investors how to use the data, but we expect that investors and other stakeholders will be able to use ASCOR in a variety of ways.
The ASCOR framework was designed to avoid introducing an income bias which could penalise emerging markets when assessing country performance on climate change. It was developed in line with the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’ (CBDR-RC) enshrined in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which posits that countries’ contributions to climate change mitigation should consider their differing responsibilities for climate change and abilities to act. This has important implications for how countries at different income levels are assessed.
Overall, by providing consistent comparisons between countries climate policies, the ASCOR tool allows investors to make objective country peer evaluations, helping them identify climate finance opportunities and needs.
