Get Started in Sustainability Reporting: 4 Tips

Sustainability reporting has been reshaped twice since we first wrote this post: first by the arrival of the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), and then by the 2026 "Omnibus" simplification package that narrowed who has to comply with them. If you're only just starting to think seriously about sustainability reporting, that's actually good news — you get to build a strategy for the rules as they now stand, rather than unpicking one built for rules that have since moved.

Where things stand

The Omnibus reforms, finalised by the EU Council in February 2026 and in force from 18 March 2026, raised the CSRD threshold to companies with more than 1,000 employees and over €450 million in net turnover, cutting roughly 80% of originally in-scope companies out of mandatory reporting (Council of the EU, February 2026). Outside the EU, the picture is more about convergence than divergence: the IFRS Foundation reports that as of April 2026, 28 jurisdictions have adopted its ISSB sustainability standards (IFRS S1 and S2) on a voluntary or mandatory basis, with more than 40 jurisdictions taking some regulatory step towards them (IFRS Foundation). Switzerland has its own mandatory regime running in parallel: the Ordinance on Climate Disclosures, in force since 1 January 2024, requires large public companies and financial institutions above set employee, balance-sheet and turnover thresholds to report climate risk in line with TCFD recommendations (Swiss Federal Council).

In other words: whether or not your company falls inside a mandatory regime, the direction of travel — climate risk, GHG emissions, transition plans, double materiality — is now broadly consistent across markets, even where the legal thresholds differ.

PwC's annual round-up of the best sustainability reports remains a useful shortcut for anyone starting out, and its fundamentals travel well regardless of which regime applies to you.

Four fundamentals to start with

• Align your sustainability strategy with your core corporate strategy. A report that reads as a bolt-on to the "real" business strategy is easy to spot, and it undermines credibility even where the data itself is sound.
• Identify your material impacts — where your business actually makes its biggest impact, positive or negative — rather than reporting evenly across every possible topic regardless of relevance.
• Set and disclose real KPIs and targets for your sustainability goals, with enough specificity that progress (or the lack of it) can be checked in future years.
• Report in a balanced way, showcasing successes and challenges alike. A report with no setbacks in it reads as marketing, not reporting, and increasingly sophisticated readers notice the difference.

Building on the fundamentals

Once the basics are in place, companies can move on to the more advanced elements that mandatory frameworks now expect from those in scope: governance disclosures, stakeholder engagement processes, risk management integration and independent assurance over the reported data. None of this needs to happen at once — a credible first report, built on the four fundamentals above, is a far better foundation than an ambitious first attempt that tries to do everything and does none of it well.

A note on timing

One of the more useful things the Omnibus reforms did, whatever view you take of scope reduction generally, was buy breathing room for companies that were racing an unrealistic timeline. The original "Wave 2" cohort — companies due to report on financial year 2025 data, with reports due in 2026 — has now been pushed back two years under the Stop-the-Clock mechanism, with reporting shifting to FY2027 data due in 2028, and only for companies that still meet the new, higher thresholds. If your company was quietly panicking about a 2026 deadline, it's worth checking, before doing anything else, whether that deadline still applies to you at all.

That extra time is only useful if it's spent building real capability rather than simply relaxing. The frameworks converging around double materiality, GHG emissions accounting and transition planning aren't going away — the Omnibus reforms simplified who has to report and how much, not the underlying direction the world's sustainability reporting is moving in. A company that uses this window to build genuinely good data collection and a genuinely honest narrative will be in a far stronger position than one that waits until a deadline forces the issue.

Choosing a framework

For companies outside mandatory scope who still want to report — because customers ask, because investors ask, or because it's simply good practice — the choice of framework matters less than consistency once you've chosen one. GRI remains the most widely used global framework and the most accessible starting point for a first report. The UN Global Compact's Ten Principles and the Sustainable Development Goals are useful for framing a narrative around, particularly for companies wanting to connect their work to a globally recognised reference point, though neither is a reporting standard in the technical sense GRI or ESRS are. Whichever you choose, the discipline of sticking with it year over year — so that a reader can actually track progress rather than comparing apples to oranges — matters more than which framework's logo appears on the cover.

As a communications agency with a specialisation in sustainability reporting, Bwritr works with companies to develop, write and produce their sustainability reports, drawing on frameworks including GRI, the UN Global Compact and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Get in touch to find out more.