“Manifest Climate brought the technological knowledge, a solid understanding of the sustainability reporting landscape, and the ability to translate complexity into something practical and usable for our team.”
Uta Jungermann, Reporting Matters and Membership Criteria, WBCSD
Results at a glance
Overview
Every year, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) evaluates the publicly available sustainability information of more than 200 member companies against a comprehensive assessment framework. These assessments give each member practical feedback on the maturity, quality and impact of its reporting, making sustainability performance a key driver of competitiveness.
As sustainability reporting requirements grew, WBCSD’s annual assessment process became increasingly difficult to scale. The assessments required the review of hundreds of pages, interpretation of complex criteria, and consistent scoring across a growing volume of disclosures.
WBCSD partnered with Manifest Climate to introduce AI-powered assessments at scale. By combining WBCSD’s proprietary framework with sustainability-specific AI and source-traceable evidence, the team scaled assessments across its global membership while maintaining the quality, transparency, and expert oversight members rely on.
The challenge
Growing disclosure complexity and volume
For years, WBCSD's annual assessments relied on a manual assessment approach reviewing sustainability reports and supporting information.
While comprehensive, the process created growing operational challenges.
The time required to review disclosures, interpret evidence, and evaluate every company consistently exceeded available capacity. The difficulty was volume.
As sustainability reporting shifts from voluntary to mandatory in many markets, companies publish far more information, and they spread it across a growing set of documents. What used to live mostly in a single sustainability report is now split across annual and integrated reports, policy statements, transition plans and other forms of sustainability communications.. Additionally, the level of detail and information provided has become far more dense.
Achieving the sample size needed for benchmarking and trend analysis became increasingly difficult within tight deadlines while maintaining a consistent assessment approach.
.More importantly, WBCSD was establishing a new baseline year for future assessments making consistency, transparency, and auditability more important than ever.
“Companies are now publishing significantly more information, more comprehensive, more detailed, and spread across many resources. The sheer volume has become increasingly difficult to get through consistently using a human approach.”
Uta Jungermann, WBCSD
Before Manifest Climate
- Manual review of hundreds of reports and disclosure sources
- Significant time spent finding and validating evidence
- Multiple reviewers interpreting complex criteria, creating inconsistencies
- Growing need for transparent, auditable scoring
Why WBCSD chose Manifest Climate
AI built for custom assessment, not just summarization
WBCSD explored several approaches to modernizing its assessment process.
Traditional spreadsheets could organize information but couldn't consistently apply a complex assessment and scoring methodology.
General-purpose AI tools could summarize documents but lacked the ability to consistently evaluate disclosures against WBCSD's criteria across many sources or provide transparent evidence behind each finding, failing to give the team confidence in the output.
- Applies WBCSD's proprietary framework and scoring methodology
- Surfaces source-traceable evidence behind every assessment finding
- Standardizes evaluation across multiple reviewers
- Supports human expertise rather than replacing it
“We looked at other providers with relevant AI and sustainability experience, but Manifest Climate was simply the best fit for what we needed. In the end it came down to that human connection. We felt we were operating on the same wavelength.”
Uta Jungermann, WBCSD
The solution
Collect and organize disclosures
Manifest Climate ingests and classifies each member company's most recent public sustainability disclosures, creating a single source of truth for every assessment.
Evaluate against WBCSD's framework
Purpose-built sustainability AI evaluates disclosures against WBCSD's encoded criteria, determining whether each is met and extracting source-backed evidence for audit and due diligence.
Apply proprietary scoring
Using the configurable Scoring Lab, WBCSD applies its own weighting methodology, compares results across sectors and regions, and refines scoring where needed.
Deliver actionable insights
Assessment outputs support deeper analysis, member conversations and future reporting workflows through integrations and AI-powered exploration.
The transformation
Before Manifest Climate
- Manual review of hundreds of reports
- Analysts searching across many documents for evidence
- Limited capacity to assess every member
- Risk of inconsistent scoring across analysts
- Difficult to validate assessment results
- Time spent reviewing reports and preparing meetings
After Manifest Climate
- AI-powered first-pass assessments
- Centralized, source-traceable evidence
- Scalable assessments across the full member base
- Consistent scoring methodology applied
- Transparent, auditable evidence for every score
- Time focused on expert insights and member engagement
Business value delivered
Enterprise scale
- Assessed the full member base consistently
- Enabled AI-powered first-pass reviews
- Future-proofed the process as reporting and membership grow
Assessment quality
- Applied consistent criteria across every company
- Surfaced more evidence than manual review
- Delivered fully traceable, auditable results
Operational efficiency
- Reduced manual report reading and data gathering
- Freed the team to focus on recommendations and engagement
AI confidence
- Adopted AI for a mission-critical assessment process
- Established a trusted, repeatable AI-assisted workflow
Looking ahead
Following the successful implementation, WBCSD is expanding its use of Manifest Climate to further strengthen its member assessment program.
Future initiatives include:
- Scaling AI-assisted assessments across the full global membership
- Expanding AI-powered querying during member engagement
- Automating document collection and labeling
- Deepening integration with internal data workflows via Sales and MCP
- Continuing to evolve the assessment methodology as sustainability expectations grow
Assess your disclosures at scale, with evidence you can defend
The same AI-powered assessment engine WBCSD uses to review 200+ member companies, applied to your framework and your criteria, with source-traceable evidence behind every finding.
- ✓ Your framework, not a template
- ✓ Source-traceable evidence
- ✓ Consistent scoring at scale