Den svenska utredningen om genomförandet av ändringarna i #CSRD (SOU 2026:27) föreslår att EU:s #Omnibus I‑lättnader införs så snart som möjligt:

▪️Våg 1‑bolag: från räkenskapsår som börjar 1 jan 2026
▪️Våg 2‑bolag: från räkenskapsår som börjar 1 jan 2027

Företag som inte längre uppfyller de nya gränsvärdena slipper lagstadgad hållbarhetsrapport för räkenskapsåret 2026. Inga svenska särregler föreslås – genomförandet sker i linje med EU‑rätten.

Nya gränsvärden för rapporteringsplikt

Ett företag (eller moderföretag i en koncern) omfattas endast om det under två år i rad har:

▪️> 1 000 anställda, och
▪️> 4,9 mdkr i nettoomsättning

Detta ersätter dagens regler och den tidigare vågindelningen (inkl NFRD‑baserad rapportering). Börsnoterade små och medelstora företag faller därmed ur scope.

Utredningen bedömer att endast 150–200 svenska företag kommer att omfattas framöver. Samtidigt väntas vissa företag fortsätta rapportera frivilligt.

Tillgången till hållbarhetsinformation beräknas dock minska, vilket kan påverka investerare, sparare och civilsamhället negativt.

Dotterföretag, koncerner och tredjelandsföretag

▪️Dotterföretag omfattas inte om koncernen redan rapporterar enligt #ESRS eller likvärdiga standarder.

▪️De ska dock upplysa om detta i förvaltningsberättelsen och länka till moderföretagets rapporter.

▪️Filialer till tredjelandsföretag blir rapporteringspliktiga först vid > 4,9 mdkr i EES‑omsättning och > 2,2 mdkr i filialomsättning.

▪️Finansiella holdingföretag vars dotterföretag har affärsmodeller och verksamhet som är oberoende av varandra blir inte rapporteringspliktiga.

Värdekedjan och skyddade företag

▪️Ett företag i värdekedjan med ≤ 1 000 anställda betraktas som skyddat företag.

▪️Det kan därmed vägra att lämna information som ett rapporterande företag begär för sin hållbarhetsrapportering, om uppgifterna går utöver de frivilliga standarder som EU väntas fastställa senast den 19 juli 2026.

👉 Begränsningen gäller när information efterfrågas för att uppfylla kraven i hållbarhetsrapporteringen – inte när information begärs som del av företagets ordinarie leverantörsstrategi.

👉 Den europeiska centralbanken (ECB) rekommenderar i sitt yttrande (feb 2026 sid. 13) att företag som inte längre omfattas av CSRD använder ESRS för sin frivilliga rapportering.

▪️Rapportering om värdekedjan kan undantas i tre år om information saknas – men det rapporterade företaget måste redogöra för sina försök att få fram den.

Revision

Revisorsinspektionen föreslås få möjlighet att godkänna revisorer och revisionsföretag från tredjeland för att granska hållbarhetsrapporter i Sverige – under förutsättning att kraven på granskningen och på revisorn är likvärdiga med svensk rätt.

Tredjelandsrevisorer ska kunna godkännas redan nu – så länge de lämnar in vissa uppgifter. Från och med räkenskapsår 2031 krävs full likvärdighet med svensk rätt.

Remisstid

Förslagen är nu ute på remiss till 21 augusti 2026.

Källa: https://regeringen.se/rattsliga-dokument/statens-offentliga-utredningar/2026/04/sou-202627/

The below document published recently by world’s biggest individual investor, NBIM, is a must read for any board member and top manager — as nature is moving up the investor agenda.

NBIM stresses that these expectations are based on their “beliefs about what contributes to long-term value creation and sound risk management”.

Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) — holding 2.3% of all listed European companies — is effectively redefining financial materiality

The document sets out how NBIM expects companies to manage environmental and social matters, including nature related impacts, dependencies, risks, and opportunities.

It is not soft guidance, NBIM writes. “It is a de facto global standard for nature‑related governance.”

It includes board‑level oversight requirements, policies, time‑bound targets and action plans, as well as engagement and potential divestment for non‑compliance.

“The degradation of land, freshwater systems, and marine environments all affect the long-term value of companies in our portfolio. The financial risks … are already apparent and are likely to increase over time.

Companies face risks when natural resources they depend on become scarce or degraded, and when their environmental impacts lead to regulatory action, legal liability, operational restrictions or reputational risks.

Evolving trends in consumer demands and availability of natural resources will also present opportunities as new markets are created.

We expect companies to address these topics in a manner meaningful to their business model and wish to support them in their efforts.

Our expectations are primarily directed at company boards.

Boards should understand the broader environmental and social consequences of company operations, taking into account the interests of relevant stakeholders.

They must set their own priorities and account for the associated outcomes.

Companies should pursue relevant opportunities and address significant risks.

They should report financially material information to investors, and broader impacts as appropriate.

Boards should effectively guide and review company management in these efforts.

Our expectations follow a logical implementation flow from strategic oversight to implementation.

The core expectations establish the foundational governance and strategic requirements that boards and senior management should address.”

—

An unparalleled reach across markets and sectors

NBIM manages Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, set up in the 1990s to invest revenues from the country’s oil and gas industry.

The fund, the largest of its kind in the world, currently has a value of just over $2 trillion.

It invests in more than 7,200 companies across 60 countries and has stakes in around 1.5% of the world’s publicly listed stocks with holdings including a 1.3% stake in Nvidia, a 1.2% stake in Apple and a 1.3% stake in Microsoft.

This gives NBIM unparalleled reach across markets and sectors.

Where to start to meet investor expectations?

By adopting the ESRS 2.0 reporting standards and associated governance processes.

If you have not yet participated in our ESRS 2.0 training, offered free of charge, you are welcome to get in touch: https://cleeritesg.com/index.php/how-can-we-help/

Sources :

https://www.nbim.no/en/responsible-investment/our-expectations/climate-and-nature/nature/

https://www.nbim.no/contentassets/5fce0e1e7e15449ca986ac1cd26d7e0f/nature-expectations-2026.pdf

🔎 What the financial and supervisory authorities expect from the revised ESRS

When the European Commission adopts the delegated acts on the ESRS, it must consider EFRAG’s draft (December 2025) and request the opinions of a wide range of EU bodies — including ESMA, EBA, EIOPA, the ECB, the European Environment Agency, the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), the Committee of European Auditing Oversight Bodies and the Platform on Sustainable Finance.

Below is a short overview of the ECB, EBA, ESMA and EIOPA opinions — all of which shed light on the sustainability information that financial markets need, and the expectations placed on companies, banks and insurers.

You can download a more comprehensive summary here: Summary of ECB, EBA, ESMA and EIOPA opinions on simplified ESRS 05-03-2026

🔹 Digitisation and usability

ESMA emphasises that effective digital tagging is essential for the usability of sustainability information. Users must be able to identify and retrieve key data efficiently.

🔹 Concerns about cumulative reliefs

All authorities highlight that the accumulation of relief measures risks undermining the CSRD’s objective: creating a reliable, standardised data ecosystem that enables benchmarking, risk differentiation and comparability.

🔹 Permanent reliefs and distorted incentives

They warn that several permanent reliefs could create incentives for undertakings to omit relevant information or delay efforts to improve methodologies and data access. This would weaken the integrity and comparability of disclosures — and increase greenwashing risks.

🔹 Competitiveness and alignment with ISSB

In many areas, the new ESRS reliefs go beyond those in the IFRS ISSB standards, with potential negative consequences for EU companies’ competitiveness and access to global financial markets.

🔹 Reliefs must remain exceptional

The ECB recognises that companies may need initial flexibility while building data systems and estimation methods. But it stresses that reliefs must remain exceptional, not become the norm.

🔹 Progressive capability‑building

For the EBA, once impacts, risks and opportunities (IROs) are identified, undertakings should progressively equip themselves to provide the required ESRS information.

🔹 Avoiding long‑term data gaps

All authorities agree: it is essential to avoid indefinite data gaps and to maintain incentives for companies to start collecting data and improving coverage and quality.

🔹 Assurance implications

ESMA notes that permanent reliefs will require additional judgement from assurance providers and more documentation from preparers — potentially increasing the reporting burden.

👥 FRA’s perspective

In addition, the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) issued an opinion focused on safeguards for people adversely affected by corporate activities. FRA warns that several changes may make severe or systemic human rights impacts less visible — especially those occurring deep in value chains or affecting marginalised groups.

FRA’s full opinion is particularly relevant for HR, sustainability and compliance professionals: https://fra.europa.eu/en/news/2026/fra-issues-legal-opinion-proposed-simplified-european-sustainability-reporting-standards

Link to the Omnibus I directive: Directive – EU – 2026/470 – EN – EUR-Lex

While ECB, EBA, ESMA and EIOPA focus in particular on cross-cutting and environmental standards, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) opinion assesses whether the proposed simplifications of ESRS preserve essential safeguards for people adversely affected by corporate activities, and do not compromise the protection of human rights or the quality of disclosures.

FRA applies a risk-based human rights approach, grounded in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises.

FRA’s full opinion is particularly relevant for HR and compliance professionals: https://fra.europa.eu/en/news/2026/fra-issues-legal-opinion-proposed-simplified-european-sustainability-reporting-standards

Here’s a short summary :

What changed / Why it matters for fundamental rights

• The recent simplification of the ESRS aimed to ease the reporting burden on companies, particularly smaller entities, while seeking to retain the essential safeguards that underpin effective sustainability disclosure.
• The sustained focus on a human rights risk-based framework aligned with the approach articulated in the UNGPs is welcome for its potential to enhance focus and practicality.
• However, a more streamlined regime also carries risks, including the possibility of inconsistent application or reduced transparency where companies interpret materiality too narrowly.
• The draft simplified ESRS introduce extensive reductions in mandatory data points, broaden the reliance on reliefs and phase ins, and increase the use of estimates and proxies in value chain reporting.
• Social metric reductions affect gender equality, non-employee transparency, work life balance, and occupational health and safety, while climate and pollution disclosures have become less prescriptive.
• These changes matter because they may render making severe or systemic human rights impacts less visible, particularly where they occur deep in value chains or affect marginalised groups.
• Moreover, simplifications in climate and pollution reporting may slow the detection of harms affecting fundamental rights to health, decent work, and a safe environment.

FRA are also apposed to relocating human rights policy disclosures to a single, cross-cutting item ( GDR-P), since it risks reducing human rights to generic statements. The GDR-P disclosures should require to remain explicitly disaggregated by rightsholder group (own workforce, value chain workers, affected communities and consumers), setting out group-specific commitments and the associated governance and due diligence approaches, rather than a single, undifferentiated policy statement.

In addition, FRA identifies three clusters of changes that could significantly weaken transparency on gender outcomes:

1️⃣ Gender pay gap (S1‑15)

The simplified ESRS would require companies to disclose only the unadjusted gender pay gap — a single aggregate figure showing the raw difference in average pay between men and women.

No adjusted analysis.

No breakdown by age, category, or country.

This falls short of both GRI and the Pay Transparency Directive, which requires deeper analysis and action when unexplained gaps exceed 5%.

Without granularity, companies may appear compliant while lacking the insight needed to detect discrimination or structural bias.

2️⃣ Removal of gender‑disaggregated data

Several mandatory gender breakdowns disappear in the simplified standards, including:

▪️ non‑guaranteed‑hours employees (S1‑5)

▪️ participation in performance and career development reviews, and average training hours (S1‑12)

▪️ uptake of family‑related leave (S1‑14)

These deletions reduce visibility into gender‑specific outcomes — especially for women in precarious roles or with limited access to development opportunities.

They also diverge from GRI requirements and weaken the ability to identify structural barriers.

3️⃣ From “parental leave” to “maternity leave” (S1‑10)

Replacing parental leave with maternity leave narrows the scope of social protection disclosures.

EU law — notably Directive (EU) 2019/1158 — promotes shared caregiving, granting each parent at least four months of parental leave.

By focusing only on maternity leave, the simplified ESRS risk reinforcing the stereotype that childcare is primarily a women’s responsibility, sidelining fathers and undermining gender equality objectives.

🔍 Why this matters

Taken together, these revisions reduce the ESRS’ ability to reveal gender disparities.

Without mandatory gender‑disaggregated data, companies will struggle to identify patterns such as:

▪️ women’s over‑representation in variable‑hour or part‑time roles,

▪️ unequal access to training and career development,

▪️ structural barriers affecting women differently across operations and value chains.

Intersectional inequalities — increasingly recognised in EU policy — also become harder to detect when disclosures are limited to aggregate figures.

💬 Final thought

Transparency is not a burden; it is a prerequisite for progress.

If we want to close gender gaps, our reporting standards must illuminate inequalities — not obscure them.

Let’s keep pushing for the data and the standards that make equality real.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has published its opinion on the draft simplified ESRS. As a long‑standing supporter of the EU’s sustainability reporting framework, it welcomes the simplification achieved, calling it “a good starting point” as reporting practices mature.

ECB focused on the standards most relevant to the ECB’s mandate: ESRS 1, ESRS 2, E1 (Climate Change) and E4 (Biodiversity and Ecosystems), essential for identifying, assessing and managing financial risks stemming from climate‑ and nature‑related physical and transition factors.

Over 90% of ECB‑supervised banks have identified these factors as material sources of financial risk.

Banks depend on reliable sustainability data to assess creditworthiness, price products and evaluate collateral.

The ECB stresses that the revised ESRS must ensure transparency, high‑quality information and comparability to support sound risk management, financial stability and effective capital allocation.

⭕ Reliefs, phase‑ins and exemptions

A key challenge is balancing simplification with the EU’s CSRD objectives.
The ECB warns that the permanent reliefs, phase‑ins and exemptions — many going beyond IFRS/ISSB — risk creating data gaps, reducing comparability and weakening interoperability with international standards.

This could undermine investor confidence and place EU companies at a competitive disadvantage globally.

The ECB recommends time‑limiting reliefs and removing the additional 3‑year phase‑in for anticipated financial effects (AFEs), which would delay the data until 2030.

ECB also notes that, following Omnibus I, the revised ESRS will apply only to Europe’s largest companies, which generally have the resources to meet these requirements.

⭕ Assurance standards

ECB staff stress the importance of swiftly adopting assurance standards, as these will be essential for improving the quality and comparability of disclosures under the revised ESRS.

⭕ VSME

ECB staff highlight concerns about using the VSME as the voluntary standard for companies outside the CSRD scope.

The VSME was designed for non‑listed SME companies with fewer than 250 employees, whose sustainability risks and complexity differ significantly from larger companies (with up to €450m turnover and/or 1 000 employees).

👉 The revised ESRS are a more suitable voluntary option, as they can flexibly accommodate companies of different sizes and complexities thanks to their materiality‑driven approach, and the ESRS are now more streamlined in terms of datapoints.

While ECB staff support voluntary reporting under the revised ESRS, they stress the need for guidance and safeguards to limit greenwashing risks.

Voluntary use must not allow cherry‑picking, which could enable companies to disclose only favorable information while obscuring material negative impacts or risks.

⭕Additional information for the financial sector

For credit institutions, most ESG risks, impacts and opportunities are concentrated in the downstream part of the value chain, as they are related to the activities of the clients that they fund.

ECB recommend the addition of guardrails so that the new DMA value chain flexibilities do not lead to the non-identification of material IROs which would ultimately compromise a fair presentation and lead to financial risks not being disclosed and managed by banks.

Regarding greenhouse gas emission reduction targets under ESRS E1-6: complementing the disclosure of a GHG intensity target with information on the associated absolute figure as per ESRS Set 1 is necessary to achieve a fair presentation, to enable a better understanding of the target and to avoid misleading users (given that intensity targets might show a decrease whereas in fact absolute emissions are expected to increase).

Exempting the financial sector from providing transparency on their emissions reduction commitments could give rise to systemic greenwashing risk and create opacity, possibly resulting in an underestimation of risks by investors and the misallocation of funds.

The link to full opinion: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/ecb.staffopinion_europeansustainabilityreportingstandards202602.en.pdf

In simplified ESRS IRO management has taken center stage

On October 1st ESMA wrote that “the objective of the sustainability statement is not to report on a sustainability topic related to material IROs, but rather to provide material information on the material IROs which pertain to different topical areas”.

And that the “logic of the overarching structure of the ESRS” is “the description of the IROs and of how they are managed through policies, actions and targets”.

From EFRAG’s basis for conclusions we learn that:

⭕ The connectivity between IROs and PATs has been clarified and emphasized

The objective of the sustainability statement, taken as whole, is to present fairly all the business’s sustainability-related material impacts, risks and opportunities (IROs) and how the business manages them through policies, actions, targets and metrics (PATMs), and thereby manages (or not) the related material sustainability topics.

The embedded logic of the ESRS therefore calls for identification of material IROs and disclosure of PATMs – or their absence – for the related sustainability topic.

Companies can now use a tabular format for presenting the material IROs and PATs and also specify the list of material topics for which there are no PATs.

ESRS no longer require disclosure of reasons for not having PATs or plans and timeline to implement them.

The text now also clarifies that the description of material IROs may be presented alongside information on PATM.

Value chain information presented in SBM-1 remains essential for understanding and linking IROs within a sustainability statement.

⭕ General Disclosure Requirements (GDR) for PATs

The overlaps that existed between MDRs (now GDRs) for PATs on the one hand, and topical mandatory datapoints, on the other, have been addressed with the following:

• “Minimum” Disclosure Requirements (MDR) have been renamed “General” Disclosure Requirements (GDR), reflecting the fact that they are the reference point for the required information to be disclosed for PATs across all topical Standards.
• There are no (or very limited) other PAT datapoints in the topical Standards.

⭕ Level of aggregation disclosures related to IRO management

ESRS now clarifies the possibility to disclose PATM information at different levels of aggregation, reflecting factors such as the nature of the IROs or the way the business manages them, as well as the level at which significant variations of material IROs arise.

A specification has been also added in case of adoption of PATs but only for certain aspects (of a topic).

⭕ AMF, the regulator of the French financial market, also wrote:

A common structural gap across policies, actions and targets (PAT) is their lack of explicit linkage to the material impacts, risks, and opportunities (IROs) identified through the materiality assessment.

While some companies articulate this alignment clearly, most disclosures remain siloed, preventing readers from understanding how corporate responses are tailored to material sustainability topics.

Embedding this IRO-to-response logic systematically across disclosures would enhance narrative coherence, reduce duplication, and reinforce alignment with the ESRS architecture.

Sources:

https://www.efrag.org/sites/default/files/media/document/2025-12/Draft_Amended_ESRS_Basis_for_Conclusions_2025_December.pdf

https://www.esma.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2025-10/ESMA32-846262651-5289_ESRS_revision_ESMA_response_to_EFRAG_consultation.pdf (paragraph 35 and 77)

Page 56 in https://www.amf-france.org/sites/institutionnel/files/private/2025-10/amf_study_csrd_reporting_the_way_forward_2025.pdf