The sustainability reporting landscape is changing. Here’s what we’re doing about it

 

When it comes to sustainability, investors, regulators, and customers expect more than promises—they demand proof. That’s where the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) comes in. This EU regulation requires companies to disclose sustainability-related risks and opportunities, aiming to improve transparency and comparability in reported sustainability data. It also ensures that sustainability reporting carries the same rigor and credibility as financial reporting. Implementation is phased, and the earliest cohort of companies submitted their first reports in 2025.

However, broader CSRD mandation could be delayed, following a package of proposals from the European Commission. For many companies, this could be good news – offering more time to refine sustainability strategies and focus on what matters most for business, customers, and external stakeholders.

Last year, we reported on Yondr’s CSRD journey for the first time. Now, in light of recent changes to the directive, we’re revisiting our plans and assessing what this means for Yondr. We spoke with Vijay Bedarkar, Sustainability and ESG Manager at Yondr and Nicolas Heath from ERM, to hear about the impact of changes to CSRD.

What’s the EU omnibus and what does it mean for companies like Yondr?

 

Nic: The European Commission has recently introduced a significant package of legislative proposals, often referred to as the ‘omnibus’, aimed at refining the bloc’s sustainability reporting landscape. The core purpose of these changes is to ease the reporting burden on companies and bolster the EU’s overall economic competitiveness. This has led to substantial updates to key regulations, most notably the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).

For thousands of companies, these changes manifest in a few important ways. Firstly, the implementation timeline for mandatory reporting under CSRD has been delayed by two years, offering companies more time to prepare. Secondly, the thresholds for compliance have been raised, meaning the rules now apply to larger businesses — specifically, those with over 1,000 employees and a turnover exceeding €450 million. The CSDDD has been scaled back even more dramatically, now targeting only the very largest companies.

Broadly across all companies, regardless of your specific situation, it’s critical to keep an eye on the evolving debate. Now that we have a little more clarity around the scoping, with the recent decisions on the 1,000-employee threshold, companies can and should review that scoping exercise with their legal teams. It’s also critical for any company to identify the interconnections with other global standards, like the ISSB’s, to make sure you’re building maturity in some of those ‘no-regret’ areas. Areas like transition planning, climate risk analyses, and financial quantification — these are going to be part of the reporting landscape regardless of the final shape of EU regulation.

This CSRD reset provides a great opportunity for companies to rethink their materiality assessments and make sure they’re focusing on risks and opportunities that are genuinely going to drive business value, particularly for organisations like Yondr that may be deemed out of scope. In this period of uncertainty, there’s additional license for companies to think through which data points are going to be meaningful in driving sustainability action.

With Yondr potentially out of scope, how has CSRD been a useful tool? 

Vijay: Although mandatory CSRD compliance was demanding — from the sheer volume of data points to the need for cross-company alignment, it helped us galvanise the team. Our double materiality assessment was well timed as we were in the process of reviewing our sustainability strategy. We were therefore well positioned to feed our material impacts, risks and opportunities (IROs) into our refreshed strategy.

We also capitalised on involving a wide range of internal and external stakeholders and that ultimately led to a richer understanding of our material areas, including some unique and nuanced IROs around engaging communities or sustainable innovation. For example, our social impact strategy – Welcome Neighbour, Global Citizen, was strengthened by what we were being informed through the outputs of the double materiality assessment.

Ultimately, CSRD provided a framework to help develop our sustainability strategy and to put a structure around progress and reporting.

How is Yondr responding to the CSRD changes, Vijay?

 

Vijay: Regardless of the sustainability and ESG landscape, Yondr is still in a high impact sector. With the data center industry growing at pace, challenges around community engagement, energy transition and power consumption aren’t going anywhere.

In the next few years, we want to be able to look back and say we’ve focused on remaining open about addressing the right issues irrespective of regulation. Our focus is on the future, not the current uncertainty.

A key part of our work this year is building a new reporting strategy for the next five years. The landscape has changed significantly in the past few years, and we’re keen to ensure that we’re aligning with the best practices from both mandatory and voluntary reporting standards. It’s a strategy that won’t only meet disclosure requirements but will put us in good stead in the marketplace, allowing us to navigate the noise and uncertainty and remain consistent in our approach.

This will involve using globally recognised sustainability reporting frameworks — like CSRD and ISSB. But also, keeping an eye on what our peers are doing and maintaining client dialogue to hear what’s important to them and what they’re aligning with. Of course, we’ll soon look to update our double materiality assessment too as we’re a different business to what we were in 2023.

One of the opportunities we now have, as a result of the CSRD changes, is that we can lean into parts of the directive that are most impactful for our company, even if they aren’t mandated. This extra time gives us a chance to explore internal priorities and stagger our work.

Keeping up the ESG conversation

 

For Yondr, and other companies that may not be mandated under the CSRD changes, this isn’t a reason to take our foot off the pedal. It’s an opportunity to have better conversations about sustainability and move beyond regulations and frameworks as compliance tools. Now, we get to think about what matters most for key stakeholders and where we can create value through sustainability action.

Hear more about how companies can gain business value from sustainability, in ERM’s webinar on strategic CSRD reporting.

https://www.erm.com/insights/unlocking-csrds-business-value-early-cross-sector-lessons/