Sustainability disclosure is more relevant than ever in a fragmenting world
Emmanuel Faber, chair of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), used a keynote address at the Frankfurt Sustainability Standards Conference on 29 May to make a confident case for sustainability disclosure standards, as the political winds around ESG continue to shift.
The era of ESG as an organising acronym, he argued, has passed. What is needed now is a language that integrates sustainability considerations into business decision-making on risk, strategy and resilience.
Faber argued that fragmentary, complex geopolitics, far from undermining the case for sustainability disclosure, makes it more urgent. Supply chain disruption, access to water, critical materials and logistics are exactly the kinds of risks that sustainability standards will help to surface.
Reports of sustainability disclosure’s decline, it seems, have been exaggerated. The number of jurisdictions adopting ISSB standards has grown from 30 to 44 in the past year alone, with Mongolia the most recent addition.
As the standards bed in across an ever-wider community of jurisdictions, the work of making those disclosures structured, comparable and machine-readable becomes the next frontier; and the foundation on which their usefulness as to provide guiding data in a complex world depends.
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