Legal & Regulatory News

IOSCO identifies priority areas for improvement in sustainability-related disclosures

24 February 2021

The International Organization of Securities Commission (IOSCO) has issued a press release highlighting the need for globally consistent, comparable, and reliable sustainability disclosure standards, and identified three priority areas for improvement in sustainability-related disclosures by companies and asset managers:

  • encouraging progress towards a globally consistent application of a common set of international standards for sustainability-related disclosure across jurisdictions;
  • promoting greater emphasis on industry-specific, quantitative metrics in companies’ sustainability-related disclosures and standardisation of narrative information; and
  • driving international consistency of sustainability-related disclosures with a focus on enterprise value creation, including companies’ dependence on stakeholders and the external environment, while also supporting mechanisms to coordinate investors’ information needs on wider sustainability impacts – and (i) to promote closer integration of those two aspects with reporting under current accounting standards frameworks and (ii) facilitate independent assurance of companies’ disclosures.

The IOSCO Board is working with the IFRS Foundation Trustees and other stakeholders to advance these priorities, focusing on a number of objectives including the establishment of a Sustainability Standards Board with a strong governance foundation.

Click here to access the press release.