Welcome back to work and to 2025. We hope you had a nice holiday. Before the break, Financial Times took a deep dive into the current economic and political scenery behind the Omnibus package that is front and center in the global ESG/sustainability stage. Here are a few meaty excerpts from that article:
“’The complexity of the current regulatory framework and the excessive reporting obligations are one of the biggest barriers to innovation and growth within Europe,’ the centre-right European People’s party, the EU’s biggest political group, wrote in a recent paper on the car industry.
European companies … worry that they are so entangled in red tape that they will fall even further behind their US counterparts… critics argue that this is leading to a loss of competitiveness, especially if the US opts for even less and looser legislation… Between 2019 and 2024, the EU produced 13,942 legal acts. By contrast, over a similar period, the US produced just 3,725 pieces of legislation and passed 2,202 resolutions…
Valdis Dombrovskis, the EU commissioner in charge of steering its new simplification drive, told the FT, ‘There are groups which are very much in favour of simplification, if not the deregulation, and others which are more cautious. So we need to find the right balance. We are not moving away from our policy targets . . . but rather looking [at] how to [make] this less of a burden and less cost for the economy, in terms specifically of reporting requirements.’”
We should know what direction the Omnibus is headed in a few weeks. In the meantime, the first CSRD reports will start coming in for companies that have a calendar year fiscal year and we’ll get our first look at those.
Members can learn more about CSRD and disclosing ESG generally here.
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