The first reports on the climate impact of organizations under the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) won’t trickle in until 2025 for the 2024 financial year. And the greatly anticipated Securities And Exchange Commission (SEC) rule on Climate-Related Disclosure slated to be finalized in 2023 has been postponed yet again. But that hasn’t stopped independent boards and industry organizations from offering a host of frameworks, standards, and regulations – all aimed at supporting the sustainability disclosure and reporting process.
When Coco Channel gave the now famous advice of “less is more” this market did not get the message. Today, sustainability reporting at its core is a complex map of numerous non-interchangeable standards and frameworks that organizations must learn to navigate to comply with global regulations. Finding the right one (or oftentimes, the right ones) can be daunting when they are constantly merging, evolving, and creating new acronyms for sustainability professionals to sort out. For multi-national organizations, the burden of disclosing against multiples of these frameworks and standards is dismissed as the cost of covering all their bases.
In the report, Navigate When And How To Use The Colliding Landscape Of Sustainability Reporting, I’ve done the research to help you navigate the surplus of sustainability standards – a common challenge when there are many voluntary options and few mandated requirements. The report also dives into the four most popular and commonly used standards and frameworks for sustainability disclosures: International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), and the Task Force on Climate-related Disclosures’ (TCFD).
Use this report to evaluate the benefits, limitations, considerations, and how to get started with using these four common standards and frameworks. And schedule an inquiry or guidance session with me to talk about climate risk and emerging regulations for sustainability disclosure and reporting.
(written with Kaylee Mahoney, research associate at Forrester)
