The European Commission sets new sustainable finance goals. And as always, when the issue of European financial stability is raised, the relevant messages to the European Parliament, the Council of Europe and other senior EU bodies are not without mentioning international financial reporting standards and their impact on sustainability.
The Commission fully supports current international initiatives to integrate sustainability factors into the financial reporting system and expects the best results. The European Commission works closely with the International Accounting Standards Board, the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG), the European Securities and Markets Organization (ESMA) and other bodies to properly integrate the risks of sustainable finance to financial reporting, in particular, how to properly and timely recognize and reflect climate and environmental risks in the financial statements.
Next issue is generally accepted global standards for sustainability reporting, and there are fears that without them, global standards systems may intersect, contradict each other, be inconsistently applied and compete for significance. For this reason, the European Commission welcomes the basic global framework for sustainability reporting and recommends that Europe further build on sustainability reporting standards on this basis, which will take into account the concept of ‘double materiality’ (significant impact on environment and vice versa), address current sustainability issues and meet recently proposed Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).