ESG Reporting and the EU’s new CSRD

To ensure greater corporate transparency in Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) matters and to hold businesses more publicly accountable for their ESG impact, the EU recently adopted a new ESG reporting framework: the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

The EU Parliament believes that the CSRD will “end greenwashing, strengthen the EU’s social market economy and lay the groundwork for sustainability reporting standards at global level”.

It is one of the cornerstones of the European Green Deal and the Sustainable Finance Agenda and part of a wider EU policy to commit companies to respect human rights and reduce their impact on the planet.

The CSRD introduces more comprehensive reporting in line with the EU’s climate goals, obliging large companies to disclose data on the ESG impact of their activities and value chain, both more regularly and in greater detail.

Approximately 50,000 companies will be covered by the new rules, up from 11,700, which means that transparency on ESG matters will become the norm for large firms in the EU. And while the EU is the first jurisdiction to regulate corporate sustainability reporting, they certainly won’t be the last according to Brundtland Partner, Lodewijk Nell.

 

“More jurisdictions will certainly follow. Additionally, on an international UN level we see that voluntary guidelines are being developed such as the International Organisation for Standardisation’s (ISO) net-zero guidelines that were recently launched at COP27 to enable a common, global approach to contentious net-zero commitments. At Brundtland we work with our clients to realise credible sustainability reporting, applying the latest guidelines and taking a practical approach tailored to capacity and ambition level,” says Nell.

For more about reporting automation, check out the attached brochure on EPCAM™, our cloud solution for ESG reporting.