By Marya Skotte, Sustainability Consultant, and Marko Damjanovic, Senior Sustainability Consultant

The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) has been prominent in conversations among sustainability professionals over the last several years. The framework promises many challenges and opportunities for companies seeking to comply with its requirements. Because CSRD’s implications are broad and promise to immediately or eventually impact EU-based companies, as well as those who have operations in the EU and/or are in the supply chain of EU companies, it is critical to understand the framework, its requirements and how to best prepare in the coming months and years.  

ISOS Group has received many questions from clients over the last year about what they should do to prepare for CSRD compliance. While there is a lot of information available about the new requirements, we know that much of what’s publicly available is cursory information and very little provides a deep dive on the core elements of CSRD or the timeline, requirements, opportunities, challenges and implications for companies. To provide helpful and practical information, we are launching a series of thought pieces covering CSRD in detail, based on what we are doing for clients and on what we as practitioners are hearing in the sustainability space.  

Some of the topics we plan to dive into include understanding the key steps for implementation; common gaps, challenges and solutions for companies preparing for CSRD (using examples from actual companies); double materiality; assurance; and the EU Green Investment Tool. We invite our clients, partners and friends to contact us with additional questions or topics that we should focus on in more detail in this CSRD series.  

We have also conducted an increasing number of CSRD gap assessments for clients over the last year. These assessments involve our review of a client’s sustainability reporting, disclosures, data and practices against CSRD requirements. After this assessment, we help clients understand exactly what gaps they might have when complying with CSRD, how large and consequential those gaps are, and how easy they might be to address. During these assessments (and in general conversations with clients), the questions and concerns we have heard include:  

• When will the CSRD requirements apply to our company?  

• How do we meet these requirements? Are there specific criteria we need to meet?  

• How often might we need to revisit materiality in order to progress toward full compliance? 

• Our sustainability team/staff person is already stretched thin with reporting, disclosing to various standards and frameworks, engaging stakeholders, trying to measure our emissions, etc. What are the most important elements of CSRD that need to be prioritized?  

• How closely does CSRD align with sustainability standards and frameworks that we are already reporting to?  

• How closely does CSRD align with other current or pending regulations (e.g., the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Climate Related Disclosures)? 

• What level of external assurance is required for CSRD reports? 

We aim to answer these questions and more in our upcoming blog posts. These pieces will be published on our website and shared via social media over the coming weeks and months. 

We're keen to hear about additional CSRD-related topics or questions you'd like us to cover. Please email info@isosgroup.com.