CSRD SOS: An urgent call to action from CSOs and practitioners
You’re invited to a session to discuss the realities of CSRD with your fellow practitioners
Webinar event on 17th April
Over the last three months we talked to more than 30 Chief Sustainability Officers and other sustainability and finance leaders to get a full picture on how different companies are grappling with the challenges of CSRD preparation, prompted by our own experience of working with companies trying to navigate this over the last year.
What have we heard?
We’ve heard a wide range of opinions and approaches but there was clear consensus on the challenges being faced by all companies going through this process. The general experience is very consistent:
the end-game of CSRD makes sense but it’s too complex, too soon;
there is a lack of good or consistent guidance;
the regs have underestimated the scale of the task and the amount of data that companies don’t have;
double materiality can be done in so many different ways that it is creating confusion;
there’s no sense of what ‘good’ looks like, particularly on assurance; and
there is a real risk of too much resource being driven towards disclosure at the expense of more meaningful action.
We’ve also heard all the practitioners say that action is needed - partly to offer a coherent set of views to EFRAG on the challenges experienced by those implementing the directive, but also partly to ensure that CSRD doesn’t end up receiving so much criticism, and is implemented so poorly or inconsistently, that its credibility is damaged and the broader movement toward greater corporate transparency is in fact set back.
What are we planning to do?
Our overall intention is to try to build some momentum around a constructive push-back to EFRAG, signalling the very real concerns and challenges that practitioners are seeing, and setting out some ideas about how these could be addressed, while preserving and enabling the regulation’s initial intent.
We’re hosting a virtual session that will bring together practitioners from large companies in the UK, EU and US to learn about the findings of our research, share perspectives and discuss the best and possible next steps to have these concerns and challenges represented.
If you are an in-house Sustainability or Finance practitioner either thinking about, or in the middle of CSRD preparations and would like to join the conversation please register your interest by emailing us at info@sbandco.com
We need to limit spaces to keep the group relatively small and foster open, candid conversation - so please let us know asap if you’d like to join (and we’re sorry but at this point we won’t be inviting in other consultants).
Webinar details
The event will be held on Teams on 17th April
at 16:00 BST / 17:00 CET / 11:00 EST / 08:00 PST.
It will last one hour.
Register for the CSRD SOS event
Please fill in the form below, or click on the above links
Phoebe Whittome
Sustainability Strategy Director
Nick Wyver
Consultancy Director
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