INTEROPERABILITY AND HARMONIZATION
BETWEEN STANDARDS
The ISSB announced in July that its standards would have a high degree of interoperability with
the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). To ensure efficient reporting using the
ISSB standards, and complying with European reporting obligations, standard setters are now back
solving for interoperability with the intent that the standards be as similar as possible so that
stakeholders can understand how to navigate between them. Lots of companies are, or will be,
conducting materiality assessments & and disclosure gap analyses for both standards.
Understanding how the two intertwine will ultimately save time and resources by preventing
ISSB --------- ESRS
GRI --------- EFRAG
GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) released a joint statement with the European Financial Reporting
Advisory Group (EFRAG) in early September, confirming a "high level of interoperability between
the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) and the GRI Standards. Reducing any
complexity in disclosure and the possibility of double reporting." The statement says that
companies that currently use the GRI standards will be "well prepared to report under the ESRS."
The GRI standards are widely used by many companies to report on sustainability companies. This
announcement means that thousands of companies will have an easier time with compliance - at
least in Europe. The rest of the world is gravitating to the ISSB standards.
U.S. SEC CLIMATE DISCLOSURES --------- ISSB
The U.S. SEC is a member of one of the jurisdictional working groups, meaning they have been
involved in ISSB's decision-making. "The ISSB plan to keep talking to them to make sure that when
they decide where they land in terms of the climate rule that they're still considering in the US that
we're looking at the interoperability between the standards to make sure that we can make this as
efficient a process again for companies who might need to use both our requirements and the US
requirements."
duplicative work or
subsequent mapping in future
Annual / Sustainability /
Integrated Reports. ESRS
appears to be far more
granular and extensive than
IFRS S2, requiring more
metrics to be reported on. As
such, if you're preparing for
the ESRS you will be able to
cover a lot more of the IFRS,
GRI, and other interoperable
standards, but the same
cannot be said vice-versa.
Sustainability & Energy Management Simplified
