EFRAG reaches another milestone with draft ESRS standards
This week the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG) reached a major milestone, releasing the first set of (almost) final draft European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRSs). Their publication follows a public consultation this summer.
The newly created ESRSs will be implemented in newly required sustainability reporting mandated by the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which, as we reported last week, passed into EU law this month. The standards set out the reporting requirements for European companies in relation to a range of impacts, opportunities, and risks across a range of environmental, social and governance (ESG) topics.
The next steps for the standards? The European Commission will consult EU bodies and Member States on the drafts, before adopting the final standards in June 2023. Application of the standards to reporting will be phased in from 2024-2028, depending on company type.
Kerstin Lopatta, former EFRAG Acting SRB Chair, said ‘Our goal has been to strike the right balance between a game-changing step forward and a pragmatic implementation […] We are confident that we will all in due course benefit from this collective effort towards more transparency and accountability.”
We welcome this next stage in the development of the standards, which will, crucially, be made in Inline XBRL across the EU, with the taxonomy development about to commence. We congratulate everyone involved in getting the standards to this stage!
You can read EFRAG’s press release here, and see the draft ESRS here.
