Frank Bold’s research shows significant improvement in corporate disclosures largely due to the standardisation brought by the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. Companies are reporting ambitious climate targets and disclosing clearer, more comparable and meaningful sustainability information.
EU policy-makers are negotiating drastic changes proposed by the EU Commission to water down these rules as part of the first Omnibus on Simplification. The sudden U-turn and rushed legal process risks undermining momentum among the business community. Weakening the EU laws would roll back the progress made on transparency, data quality, and long-term climate planning at a time when consistency and ambition are most critical.
Our analysis shows how companies are responding to EU sustainability legislation, revealing positive developments in the transparency and quality of disclosures while also highlighting some persisting challenges:
Our analysts reviewed and assessed the sustainability information disclosed by 50 influential companies from the financial, textile, energy, agrifood and beverages, pharmaceuticals, mining and transportation sectors.
The complete research will be released this September, alongside a compilation of best practices.
Businesses require clarity, certainty, and stability to invest in sustainability reporting systems that meet market and stakeholder demands. The proposed rollbacks threaten not only environmental progress but also the credibility of EU leadership in sustainable finance. To preserve the achievements of the past decade and foster a forward-looking and competitive business environment, policy-makers in the EU Parliament must reject measures that weaken the CSRD and CSDDD and instead reinforce their consistent, effective application.
If you have any questions about the preliminary findings, or would like to share inputs, please get in touch with Susanna Arus at susanna.arus@frankbold.org or Lorena Bisignano at lorena.bisignano@frankbold.org.
To support our advocacy work on concrete legislative proposals and recommendations, we collaborate with partners from the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia to prepare and publish reports, case studies, data analyses, and examples of international best practices.
To start the New Year with an interesting and thought-provoking event, Frank Bold and ClientEarth organised a screening of This Changes Everything, a documentary based on Naomi Klein’s international non-fiction bestseller.
In his political guidelines for the new EU Commission, President Juncker pledged to create a European Capital Markets Union (CMU) to increase non-bank financing of the European economy and further integrate capital markets. In this context, the EU Commission launched a public consultation in February 2015.
