ESG head at Danish energy firm says CSRD is ‘super helpful’ but calls for changes

Cisco and Severotisk also share their views on what they need from EU policymakers when it comes to sustainability rules

The head of ESG accounting at Orsted has described the EU’s sustainability disclosure rules as making a “super helpful” contribution to the firm’s business strategy.

Orsted is about to publish its first mandatory sustainability statement under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), having already used the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) in a previous report.

“We have roughly 600 data points in our sustainability statement,” said Niels Strange Peulicke-Anderson, noting that around a third of those were quantitative numbers, and the remaining two thirds were qualitative.

Once the relevant information was collected from across the business, he explained that Orsted’s focus had shifted to how its policies, targets and actions interacted with the impacts, risk and opportunities identified.

“That has been super, super helpful for the internal alignment and agreement of what is really material for Orsted,” Peulicke-Anderson said, and had led the company to “change the whole governance of sustainability”.

Previously, most of the firm’s sustainability work was undertaken by a dedicated team, but now it has  “anchored everything more clearly in the business,” Peulicke-Anderson explained, with the sustainability team supporting the work.

Omnibus proposal

At the event, held by for-purpose law firm Frank Bold, Cisco’s head of EU policy said she was “anxious” about the current plans to re-open the legal texts underpinning CSRD and other laws.

“We may agree with the message,” said Diane Mievis. “Let’s streamline, let’s simplify, let’s pause.”

“But let’s pause for just one minute, not for five or 10 years, and that’s what we are very scared about when we think about the omnibus regulation – that [the political negotiations will take] three or four years.”

Mievis said CISCO and other companies needed more guidance and legal certainty.

Her call was echoed by Peulicke-Anderson, who said the Commission’s insistence that firms should comply with CSRD on a best-effort basis in the first year needed to be made compatible with the requirement to have reports audited.

“If you are forced to have something audited before you have prepared it properly, it’s a really heavy task, and it sometimes makes things take three or four times longer than they should. If you somehow could translate this message of ‘best efforts in the first years’ to concrete regulation and expectations around, for example, audit, that would be a great help.”

REP recently wrote about the potential to remove assurance requirements from the current CSRD.

Iva Proskova, a sustainability manager at Czech printing company Severotisk, said that for smaller firms, the ESRS provided structure, but that it required “never ending study”.

She said the most helpful thing the Commission could do was to provide guidance on how all the different sustainability rules slotted together.

“We don’t see the connections,” she said. “We need something which tells us ‘It’s linked this way, and if you have this, you’re compliant’.”

Proskova called for “well-prepared and clearly-defined” rules that don’t change during the application process.

“Because that kills us.”