What it actually is, and what it became
The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures was established by the G20's Financial Stability Board in 2015 to build a consistent way for companies to disclose the financial risk climate change poses to their business. Its 2017 recommendations became the reference model nearly every climate disclosure framework since has borrowed from, including parts of BRSR.
In October 2023, the Financial Stability Board confirmed TCFD's work was complete and formally disbanded the task force. Its recommendations didn't disappear, they were fully absorbed into the International Sustainability Standards Board's (ISSB) IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 standards, which now serve as the active, maintained successor. A company applying IFRS S2 satisfies the TCFD recommendations without needing to report against TCFD as a separate exercise.
The four pillars, still the reference model
Governance
How the organisation's board and management oversee and manage climate-related risks and opportunities.
Strategy
The actual and potential impacts of climate risks on the organisation's business, strategy, and financial planning.
Risk Management
How the organisation identifies, assesses, and manages climate-related risk.
Metrics & Targets
The metrics and targets used to assess and manage relevant climate risks and opportunities.
What ISSB adds on top
IFRS S1 covers general sustainability-related disclosures; IFRS S2 covers climate specifically, built directly on the four TCFD pillars. ISSB also absorbed SASB's industry-specific metrics in 2022, meaning a company applying IFRS S2 gets both the governance/strategy/risk framing from TCFD and sector-specific metrics from SASB in one standard, rather than needing to consult multiple separate frameworks.
Scenario analysis, the part companies find hardest
TCFD (and now IFRS S2) explicitly asks companies to test their strategy against multiple future climate scenarios, typically a below-2°C pathway and a higher-warming pathway, rather than planning against a single forecast. This is the single most demanding part of the framework to do credibly, and the part most reports still do superficially.
Related in the Guide: TCFD · ISSB · Scenario Analysis
How TCFD/ISSB relates to other frameworks
ESRS and ISSB overlap heavily but aren't identical, ESRS requires double materiality (impact on the world, not just on the company's finances), while ISSB's IFRS S2 is single-materiality, focused on financial risk to the company itself. A company reporting under both frameworks needs to satisfy the broader ESRS lens, not just the narrower ISSB one.