Reporting under the ‘E’ of the CSRD. An Overview of Legal Requirements and a Comparison With Existing Obligations under Environmental Law, Focussing on the Netherlands

Abstract

The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) introduces sweeping requirements for certain groups of companies to report on their environmental, social and governance performances. In this article, we provide an overview of the disclosure requirements under the ‘E’ in the CSRD, focusing on the requirements to report on greenhouse gasses and pollution, which – unlike climate change – have gone largely undiscussed to date. We compare those requirements with the existing obligations under European and Dutch environmental law, and share our observations along the way. We show that existing rules generally carry obligations to report raw data and emission details, whereas the CSRD will require companies to provide more context for that information and a more extensive explanation of the risks. The CSRD will also require companies to explain what policies and targets they have defined to reduce their emissions and/or their use of pollutants in the future. We do this by listing the disclosure requirements under the CSRD, using the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) adopted by the European Commission on 31 July 2023. Given the uniform manner in which the standards are structured, the comments about pollution may also serve as an example for how other standards, in particular environmental standards, should be applied.