Frank Bold is coordinating a project that aims to achieve that large companies falling under the scope of the Non-Financial Reporting (NFR) Directive in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia start disclosing key information on their sustainability-related impacts, risks and their management. The project will seek to clarify which concrete information is essential to meet the goals of the Directive, identify gaps in its implementation, inform companies and investors, ensure a proactive approach from supervisory authorities and ultimately contribute to the improvement of the European legislative framework.
For this, the project will:
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Assess the disclosure mandated by the NFR Directive of 50 large companies in the Visegrad Group countries and share the results with the assessed companies.
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Produce a report of the findings which will include a comparison of results between the four countries as well as with other EU regions, examples of good practice and specific recommendations for policy improvement
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Present the results to national supervisory authorities in the four countries, prompt enforcement in blatant cases of non-compliance and advocate to integrate these criteria in the management of state-owned enterprises
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Feed the results into the EU review of the Non-Financial Reporting Directive
The project results will be published on this website in Q2 2020.
This project complements and feeds into the work of the Alliance for Corporate Transparency, which is an NGO-led research initiative coordinated by Frank Bold Society that is carrying out a broader study of sustainability disclosure by 1000 companies in the EU.
Improving companies’ disclosure is of crucial importance to achieve the objectives of the European Commission’ Sustainable Finance Action Plan, which aims to reorient capital flows towards sustainable investment and manage financial risks stemming from climate change and other sustainability challenges. Currently, the NFR Directive does not specify in sufficient detail what concrete information on which sustainability topics should be disclosed, nor it defines sustainability objectives to be reported against. Early data concerning the implementation of the Directive shows that the vast majority of companies do not report key information relevant to their business model (see CDSB study and the Alliance for Corporate Transparency 2018 initial research). This situation puts the achievement of the above-mentioned Action Plan in jeopardy as investments will be misallocated without appropriate and comparable insights from companies.
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Partners:
Frank Bold Society (Czech Republic)
Frank Bold Foundation (Poland)
Environmental Management and Law Association (Hungary)
Comenius University in Bratislava, Faculty of Law (Slovakia)
Coordinator: Filip Gregor, Head of Responsible Companies at Frank Bold Society (filip.gregor@frankbold.org)
The project is co-financed by the Governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.¨
