Policymakers in Europe, the United States, and Asia have embraced policies aimed at providing more transparency in environmental performance.
In this context, it will be crucial for anyone doing business to adapt their strategies to the new directives, outlining goals for future sustainability, and turning them into an opportunity to differentiate and improve the appeal to clients, stakeholders, and investors.
GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) is the independent, international organization that helps businesses and other organizations take responsibility for their impacts, by providing them with the global common language to communicate those impacts. It provides the world’s most widely used standards for sustainability reporting – the GRI Standards.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future. At its heart are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are an urgent call for action by all countries - developed and developing - in a global partnership.
If the beginning of the year 2022 has brought great innovations in the development of legislative issues concerning the financial disclosure envisaged by many companies in the process of due diligence in the area of sustainability, this is largely due to the European Union's proposal concerning the 'Corporate sustainability Due Diligence Directive', CSDDD for short, published last February 2022.
The Sustainability reporting, introduced for European companies with the EU Directive 95/2014, represents to date in the international reporting landscape, the starting point of a continuously evolving path that aims to meet numerous challenges, first and foremost the integrated management of non-financial information, structured in a framework that can be as comprehensive as possible, to be placed alongside classic financial reporting.
The scope of European Union legislation, in the field of accelerating and harmonizing rules on sustainable finance, has expanded considerably in the past few years and is gradually broadening.
The state of the art of European legislation aimed at defining the legislative framework for sustainable investment is certainly the most advanced and defined in the global landscape at present.
In the new framework defined by the European Taxonomy, with regard to the rules and objectives for classifying business activities that are considered environmentally, socially, and governance sustainable, a prominent point much discussed at the moment, especially in the financial world, is covered by Article 8 of the Taxonomy.