Domestic political opportunism and foreign anti-competitive pressure threaten to dismantle one of its biggest advantages. Read below a brief summary of our conference on sustainability and competitiveness held last January 2025 in Brussels.
Our Frankly Speaking conference offered a space this January for an honest and constructive discussion on competitiveness and sustainability, including key options for meaningful simplification in the announced Omnibus.
As Filip Gregor (Head of the Responsible Companies section at Frank Bold) highlighted in his introduction, we are living in a much more problematic geopolitical context than in 2019:
In this environment, Europe’s safety and autonomy is at stake. The EU’s competitiveness strategy must:
MEP Lara Wolters in her powerful opening remarks stressed that in the face of these geopolitical challenges, European leaders must focus on delivering prosperity while avoiding a race to the bottom in social and environmental standards. The CSRD and CSDDD are important tools to ensure the competitiveness and sustainability of businesses.
While implementation is likely to pose some challenges which should be addressed, backtracking would be unhelpful, penalise companies that have proactively prepared as well as damage the credibility of the EU.
Speakers at the conference emphasized critical priorities to EU leaders for future work on sustainability policy:
Sustainability is a competitive advantage and a growth opportunity as pointed out by Mario Draghi. In the Digital Age, sustainability and ESG data are key for long-term success. They also represent a rare chance for the EU's digital economy.
Raising thresholds to exclude tens of thousands of EU companies from the ESG framework won’t improve competitiveness.
For businesses to harness the sustainability advantage, they need a legal framework and standards for sustainability reporting, legal certainty, clear guidance and less emphasis on compliance.
To make CSRD implementation easier, companies would most benefit from a gradual timeline for implementation and audit, and review of the EU reporting standards in the light of first reporting experience of very large listed companies.
The next months are key to determining what kind of sustainability data companies will disclose. For the transformation to an economy within planetary boundaries, we call on the ISSB to develop standards that go beyond climate, require reporting on key impact data and ensure climate-related disclosures are sufficiently granular to be meaningful.
The European Commission, Parliament and Council reached an agreement for the new EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) that clarifies disclosure obligations for large companies and listed SMEs, and mandates the development and adoption of mandatory EU corporate sustainability reporting standards.
An unprecedented decision was made at the Municipal Court in Prague in the historically first Czech climate litigation, for which Frank Bold Advokáti provided legal expertise.
