Latest News: EU Disclosure Law Nears Final Step, Financial Times on Demise of the ESG Movement

Here is a periodic roundup of news in the world of stakeholder management.

The European Union Corporate Sustainability Directive is in final comment period signaling an on-time enactment...Microsoft announces a cloud-based sustainability engine to support CSRD environmental disclosures...Financial Times editorial helps set the record straight on stakeholder capitalism.

EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive Releases Final Provisions for Public Comment....
Organizations have until July 7 to comment on the final provisions of this new European Union Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive.

According to a statement released by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), “This signals that the ESRS (European Sustainability Reporting Standards) are on track to be available for use by companies from 2024, as set out in the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).”

Based on ESM's initial review, the stakeholder management disclosure requirements are largely unchanged from the original version. The biggest changes are in the area of environmental disclosures, with organizations given more leeway to report on environmental issues “material” to their business, since many organizations do not have the same impact on the environment as others.

Microsoft Announces Its Sustainability Cloud Will Support the EU CSRD Law
Signaling the potential impact of the new European Union Corporate Sustainability Directive, Microsoft has announced that it will offer a cloud-based platform to support environmental disclosures, reflecting the general focus in the ESG world to date on the environment rather than people.

Financial Times Editorial Helps Set the Record Straight on Stakeholder Capitalism—It’s Just Better Business, Not Left-Wing Ideology, and Anti-ESG Efforts Are Failing Even in the US
One of the world’s leading business journals correctly states the need to separate Stakeholder Capitalism from the left- (and right-wing) ideologies that tried to redefine it following the Business Roundtable’s redefinition of the corporation to address the needs of all stakeholders during the latest period of social unrest in the US during the late 2010s.

Here are highlights from the editorial:

“The costs of climate-driven disruptions, restive employees or supply chain scandals are real. Working to reduce such risks while responding to demands for business to step up is not a leftwing agenda.”

“ESG investing itself remains a flawed catch-all, trying to encompass too many issues in one marketable acronym; there is a case for unpacking it into its separate elements. The success its opponents have found by pointing out its contradictions and hypocrisies should encourage supporters to reflect on how it has proved so vulnerable to attack. It should also prompt them to refocus on the core responsibilities that companies have to their employees, the planet and the people who hold their stock.”

Addressing these issues “in a way that acknowledges ESG’s flaws and looks for common ground between its critics on the left and right may yet rescue a vital debate about business’s place in the world from the extremes of America’s partisan battles. But believers in cleaner, more equitable and more sustainable forms of capitalism have more to do to make the case that they are driven by their companies’ long-term interests rather than by ideology.”

The editorial points out that the US backlash “is achieving less than its proponents hoped. Anti-ESG measures have been scrapped or diluted in several Republican-led states and newly formed anti-ESG funds have raised relatively trivial sums...with the average anti-ESG resolution garnering just 2.6% support....Outside the US, the backlash is having even less impact.”

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Click here to learn about the EEA’s bi-partisan Change.org petition to keep politicians out of business management.