Early adopters’ CSRD reporting
Dr. Jane Thostrup Jagd, Director Net Zero Finance
As companies prepare for mandatory reporting against the EU’s new Corporate Sustainability Responsibility Directive, our new report shares interesting examples from pioneers already aligning with the standards to help others navigate the regulatory maze.
We Mean Business Coalition welcomes the EU’s newly adopted Corporate Sustainability Responsibility Directive (CSRD) with its underlying ESRS, which will be mandatory to report against from the reporting year 2024.
But already from the reporting year 2023, we have begun to see early adopters, who have voluntarily chosen to publish fully or partially in accordance with the CSRD. Even companies that appear to be covered at a later stage than reporting year 2024, have now already voluntarily taken on the challenge and are reporting fully or partially in alignment with the CSRD. This indicates that at least some companies value the new standards and legislation.
Since the CSRD is also very new in many aspects for many companies, even for companies in the reporting vanguard, we have chosen to review 30 early adopters’ reports, and single out interesting examples, which other companies may find inspiring for their upcoming reports. As we do not have a full overview of all companies that can be categorized as CSRD early adopters, we cannot claim that these examples are complete. In fact, we are certain that there are many other early adopters’ reports in existence, which are not included in this report. Hence, we neither claim that the report is scientific in any way, nor can we provide any statistical analysis. Additionally, we do not claim that the examples included are 100% aligned with the regulation – in fact, often they are not. Neither do we indicate the companies’ reports are 100% aligned with the CSRD – in fact most often they are only partially aligned, something which many companies also indicate themselves. Finally, we do not indicate the reports’ content is valid or sustainable. The examples in the report are simply interesting solutions by principle, which we hope many companies – and their auditors – will find encouraging, when thinking about their own companies’ reporting needs.
For practicality reasons, this report does not in any way cover all CSRD’s disclosure requirements3, some of which are reasonably mature; like reporting on Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Scope 1 or 2 (E1-6), number of employees (S1-6) or the board’s gender diversity ratio (GOV-1). We have chosen to focus on elements or solutions, which have been rarely seen before, and which we know are challenging from our dialogues with companies. We have not, therefore, included examples from all 30 reviewed company reports, as some of the report solutions are fairly generic or seen many times before, but we have included all 30 reports with links at the end of the report. This way readers have a chance of their own to evaluate the reports in their entirety. Each chapter of this report begins with a reference to the main regulations and guidelines that cover the topic of the chapter – but is not in any way a complete recap of these. We recommend that the reader also read the regulations, and we have included links to these in the endnotes.
We hope, you find the report inspiring.