Following months of negotiations in the European Parliament, the amendments to the CSRD proposal have been approved by the JURI committee this Tuesday 15th of March.
Frank Bold is the coordinator of the Alliance for Corporate Transparency, a platform gathering leading civil society organisations that has provided landmark research and evidence-based recommendations for the reform and development of the sustainability disclosure framework in the EU. More recently, we coordinated a multi-stakeholder statement on the need to swiftly implement the CSRD and EU standards as well as a joint letter with investors, asset managers and civil society organisations sent to Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) calling to broaden the scope of the legislation
The final vote of the JURI committee has disappointed stakeholders by delaying the application of the new rules an additional year (compared to the initial proposal of the EU Commission), which is problematic from the perspective of EU’s green transition, as well as the urgent need to cut Europe’s dependency on fossil fuels from Russia.
On the upside, the text approved in the JURI committee includes several significant improvements on climate and human rights reporting, and tackles the problematic exemption for large subsidiaries to disclose sustainability information.
The CSRD proposal will now enter into the final phase of the legislative process with trilogue negotiations. As stated by Frank Bold’s Susanna Arus, Communications and EU Public Affairs at Frank Bold:
“An ambitious agreement needs to be reached before summer between co-legislators to avoid further delays. The final CSRD text should incorporate changes proposed by the Parliament that aim to strengthen the quality and relevance of corporate transparency on sustainability matters and dismiss counterproductive proposals that reduce the scope of companies or delay the implementation of a reform key to the transition and resilience of the EU economy”
Frank Bold Society and the Neighbourhood Association Uhelná have drawn up a document with seven basic requirements that the Czech side should insist on when negotiating with Poland. See the press release for background information.
In the face of recent opposition addressed to the EU Commission by some business associations and specific governments from Nordic Europe, NGOs have reiterated their support for the European Commission commitment to present an initiative on Sustainable Corporate Governance in 2021, following the roadmap set in the EU Green Deal and the Action Plan on Sustainable Finance.
As part of the reform of the EU Non-Financial Reporting Directive, the European Commission plans to develop mandatory EU sustainability reporting standards. The analysis of the non-financial reports of 1000 European companies by the Alliance for Corporate Transparency has proven how companies fail to report relevant, specific and comparable information. While this is true for all sustainability matters, it is particularly exacerbated in the case of corporate impacts and risks along the supply chain.
