Impact Methodology Landscape

Published July 2022

This brief provides a high level overview of the landscape of organizations working in different capacities to improve how investors and other capital providers assess the impact of their investments.

While we do broadly include projects assessing impact across overlapping environmental & social issues, our inquiry focuses on answering these questions: 

• Which existing efforts meet the unique assessment needs of investors directing capital to early technologies that intend to reduce future greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions? How and why are these efforts different from each other?

• Where the needs of investors supporting early stage technologies are not being met, how can Frame fill the gap?

We explore the overall landscape, go into detail on some influential methodologies, and briefly describe how they are tackling topics including technology diffusion and baselines. Frame revisits content annually or as needed to respond to emerging ideas. See the “last edited” date for recency and visit our evolving glossary for terms in blue referenced in the brief.