The 26th COP26 climate conference will take place in Glasgow, Scotland, from 31 October to 12 November 2021.
Although the four official targets are in line with previous climate conferences (Kyoto, Paris, …) and focus on carbon neutrality, biodiversity protection or the new “mobilisation of finance”, the outcome of the negotiations on standardising non-financial (i.e. also “carbon”) reporting is awaited with anticipation.
The situation in the field of non-financial, i.e. also environmental, reporting is very opaque and lends itself to various forms of greenwashing and ideologism.
In their June report (The Future of Sustainability Reporting Standards), EY counted more than 600 different frameworks for non-financial reporting. Therefore, the G7 decided to call for a uniform format for non-financial reporting and chose IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) or its preparatory group ISSB (International Sustainability Standards Board) as the decisive authority. This is to present a unified solution at COP26 and bring order to non-financial reporting.
Negotiations will be intense as the EU is preparing its own methodology, which is considerably more complicated than that proposed by the ISSB. It remains to be seen whether we will see true unification. It is expected that the EU will most likely adopt the standards prepared by the ISSB and supplement them with its own requirements.
Although harmonisation of non-financial reporting (including carbon auditing) is still expected, the final form is already known. EnviTrail is already following the incoming methodologies so that our partners do not have to complexly redesign their reporting system.