What does environmental reporting look like in line with the EU Non-Financial Reporting Directive?
Recent years have seen an increased appreciation of the need for decision-useful environmental, social and governance (ESG) information to help drive sustainable financial markets.
As we obtain a better understanding of the potential risks associated with climate change and environmental degradation, companies are expected to provide evidence of how they are responding, to strengthen decision-making by investors, lenders, and insurers in allocating capital and in underwriting risks.
In Europe, one of the most significant developments has been the transposition of the Non-Financial Reporting Directive, and its entry into force in Member States legislation. It seeks to facilitate “relevant, useful and comparable information by undertakings”.
The Directive 2014/95/EU on the Disclosure of Non-Financial and Diversity Information the (NFR Directive) requires certain large companies to disclose information on their business models, policies, risks and outcomes as regards to environmental matters, social and employee aspects, respect for human rights, anti-corruption and bribery issues, and diversity in their board of directors.
Although the NFR Directive still applies to this day, it is currently under review and once finally adopted, will be replaced by the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSR Directive). This new Proposal for a Directive was introduced by the European Commission in April 2021 and is now under discussions until final approval by the European co-legislators (the European Parliament and Member States within the Council of the European Union). Until the updated CSR Directive is transposed into Member State legislation, the NFR Directive remains in force. For this reason, this Handbook still focuses on the current requirements. For further information about the ongoing development of the CSR Directive, please see section The ongoing review of the NFRDirective in this chapter.
This Handbook follows on from CDSB and CDP’s First Steps review of corporate climate and environmental disclosure under the EU Non-Financial Reporting Directive, and is an update to the EU environmental reporting handbook published in 2016 and 2020. To demonstrate how companies have responded to the NFR Directive, this Handbook contains annotated examples of disclosures on environmental matters from annual reports of select European companies.
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With the contribution of the LIFE Programme of the European Union
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