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As Europe’s sustainability reporting rules face intense political scrutiny, a new analysis by Frank Bold provides timely evidence that the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) is already driving meaningful change in practice.
In reviewing the first wave of reports by 100 large European companies, the study finds that the CSRD has done what it set out to do: push sustainability reporting beyond box-ticking, provide useful data to users and turn it into a genuine management tool for navigating climate and social risks.
Across Europe, companies are beginning to show a more structured and credible approach to sustainability.
These shifts mark a cultural change in corporate reporting, where sustainability disclosures are no longer a mere PR exercise but a strategic tool to understand critical challenges, from energy and resource use to climate uncertainty, value-chain resilience, and how companies manage them.
While the first year of CSRD implementation led to noticeable improvements, challenges remain.
Particularly against the backdrop of the ongoing Omnibus simplification debate, such gaps and feedback underline why continued guidance—not deregulation—is essential to turn disclosure into effective risk management.
The research provides clear recommendations to policymakers and businesses on how to simplify reporting without weakening requirements, focusing on strategic and useful information.
The release of this report comes amid fierce discussions over the Omnibus simplification package and the rollback of corporate sustainability legislation. Following weeks of negotiations that ignored requests from businesses, investors and even the European Central Bank, the EU Parliament will hold a key vote in the JURI Committee on Monday 13 October.
Proposals to dilute reporting and due diligence requirements risk undoing the progress achieved in just one reporting cycle. Misguided simplification efforts create uncertainty for companies that have already invested in improving their systems.
By limiting availability of critical data the EU will be compromising on its competitive edge. To scale up clean tech and advance EU's strategic goals in energy efficiency or resource autonomy, access to high-quality, large-scale data is essential. The CSRD secures this information flow from companies.
This is critical for the EU to strengthen industrial competitiveness, counter China’s lead in manufacturing and green tech, and withstand pressure from the U.S and other oil-rich countries to maintain dependence on fossil fuel imports.
As this report shows, reducing sustainability reporting to a compliance cost misses its value as a strategic asset for Europe’s industrial and geopolitical strength.
This project is part of the European Climate Initiative (EUKI) of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK).
Yesterday, on 5 November 2018, a lawsuit against the Ministry of the Environment (MoE) on liability for health damages and death of her husband from lung cancer was filed with the District Court in Prague 10. The plaintiff seeks damages for lung cancer, which she has managed to cure, but her husband has succumbed to the illness in October. The cause of the disease is seen in the long-term excessive concentration of air pollutants at their place of residence in Ostrava-Radvanice and in the fact that the MoE failed to provide effective measures to decrease the pollution to legal limit values.
The Brussels office of the public interest law firm Frank Bold is currently recruiting a Research Intern to start full-time in January 2017 for a period of four to six months.
Where has the European Commission gone beyond and where has it fallen short?
