CSRD
Also: Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, EU Sustainability Reporting, Directive sur la publication d'informations en matière de durabilité, Directive CSRD, Nachhaltigkeitsberichterstattung, CSRD-Richtlinie, ESRS reporting
EU directive requiring large companies to report standardized, audited sustainability data alongside financial results.
What It Is
The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) is a European Union law that requires companies to publish detailed information about their environmental, social and governance impact. It replaces earlier, lighter reporting rules and applies to large companies operating in the EU, including many non-EU firms with significant European activity. The core shift is that sustainability data must now be reported with the same rigor as financial data: structured, comparable across companies, and externally audited. Reporting follows a common rulebook called the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS).
Why it matters
CSRD moves sustainability out of the marketing brochure and into the audited annual report. For a CFO, it means new disclosure obligations, assurance costs and board-level accountability for numbers that were once optional. For a CMO, the claims your brand makes about being green must now match what the company formally reports, or you expose the firm to greenwashing risk. A leader meets CSRD the moment a claim, a supplier decision or an investor question depends on data the company cannot yet produce reliably. For a CDO, it becomes a data problem: pulling emissions, workforce and supply-chain figures from systems never designed to track them.
How it works
CSRD introduces a concept called double materiality. A company must report both how sustainability issues affect its business (financial materiality) and how the business affects people and planet (impact materiality). You first run a materiality assessment to decide which topics actually matter for your company, then report only on those, in the ESRS format. In practice this means building data pipelines for indicators like greenhouse gas emissions across your own operations and your suppliers, employee metrics, and governance policies. An auditor then checks the disclosures. A retail executive, for example, may discover that most reportable emissions sit in the supply chain, forcing new data agreements with vendors and a rethink of sourcing decisions.