23 July 2024: Guidance designed to support organizations, including SMEs and those new to Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting, and to help understand the complex landscape, has been published by BSI.
The guidance explores the role of standards for the integration of ESG throughout organizations. It comes in the wake of a growing number of ESG regulations and frameworks that organizations are reporting against, from the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the UK’s Modern Slavery Act, to the IFRS S1 and S2 disclosure requirements.
The guidance provides analysis of the current ESG reporting landscape and sets out how implementation of International (ISO) and national (BSI) Standards can help organizations determine what to report on, and how. The guidance is published alongside an accompanying tool designed to enable organizations to identify relevant standards to support their ESG reporting needs. This enables users to filter for standards relevant to topics such as climate change, biodiversity and human rights.
The purpose of the guidance published by BSI, the UK National Standards Body, is ultimately to simplify ESG reporting by using standards.
The guidance, is BSI’s first publication of this type, and serves as a precursor to the upcoming International Organization for Standardization (ISO) International Workshop Agreement on ESG principles for organizations, which is currently under development with UK, Brazil and Canada leadership, and due to be published later this year. The IWA will provide a high-level international structure and core principles for implementing and embedding ESG within the culture of an organization. It will support management of ESG performance, as well as measurement and reporting under existing disclosure frameworks to enable consistency, comparability, and reliability of ESG reporting and practices globally.
Susan Taylor Martin, Chief Executive, BSI, said: “Environmental, Social and Governance reporting is intended to measure an organization’s impact, and is an important tool in helping to accelerate progress towards a fair society and sustainable world. However, the ESG reporting landscape is complex to navigate and can be confusing for organizations.
“BSI aims to be a trusted partner helping organizations deliver on their ESG reporting requirements by using standards to simplify and streamline the process.”
Read the full report here.
