Speaker

Frank Wijnands is a PMP-certified project professional with 18 years of experience delivering projects in high-tech industries from telecommunications to lighting, including work in semiconductor integrated circuits. He also brings four years of experience in project management competency development, work that grounds his current focus on connecting sustainability with everyday project management practice rather than treating it as a separate initiative. He is active in PMI and the PMI Netherlands Chapter, and joined the TVC Working Circle founded by Stuart Thorp to help develop the Time Value of Carbon framework presented in this session. Together with Thorp, he co-authored the paper "Time Value of Carbon: Bringing Power to the People," submitted to the PMI Belgium Fair in Brussels in October 2026.

 

Time Value of Carbon: financial integration in NPV Rethink how sustainability shows up on the balance sheet with Francois Wijnands and Grant Davis as they unveil the Time Value of Carbon in their session, "Time Value of Carbon: financial integration in NPV". This practical, insight-driven session explores how a project's carbon performance can be measured and expressed in the same financial language as Net Present Value (NPV) — on every level – project, portfolio, and organizational – offering fresh perspectives and actionable insights to make the value of sustainability visible. Building on the Time Value of Carbon (TVC) framework originated by Stuart Thorp's TVC Working Circle, which the presenters helped develop, Francois and Grant show how a project's CO2e performance can be evaluated against a Paris Agreement-aligned threshold rate, the same way NPV weighs a euro today against a euro tomorrow. Drawing on sustainability standards such as the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), they discuss how an expanded TVC model — incorporating shadow, internal, or market carbon pricing such as the Emissions Trading System (ETS) — could become a standard financial tool for project and portfolio decisions, along with its current limitations. A hypothetical heat-pump project case walks participants through translating a project's carbon investments and benefits into financial impact using ETS carbon prices, showing how sustainability performance can be built into the project and portfolio tools teams already use.

 

Learning goals summary:

• Understand that it's not just about a project's financial return – it's about making a project's carbon performance visible in the same financial terms decision-makers already use.
• Empower project and portfolio professionals to see sustainability reporting pressure not as a compliance burden but as an opportunity to prioritize projects on carbon performance, expressed as NPV.
• Learn how the Time Value of Carbon (TVC) model evaluates a project's carbon performance against a Paris Agreement-aligned threshold rate, mirroring how NPV evaluates financial performance.
• Discover how an expanded TVC model, using carbon pricing approaches such as the Emissions Trading System (ETS), could integrate carbon and financial impact into standard project and portfolio management tools.