Editorial ESG News

Dear Readers, 

 

Corporate ESG compliance is becoming critical to success and will have a significant impact on the future viability of companies. Stakeholders expect a credible, verifiable anchoring of the ESG topic in companies. At its core, it is about the trust of companies' contribution to sustainability in business and society. 

 

What does ESG mean? ESG stands for the three dimensions of sustainability: environmental, social, and governance. Environmental refers to environmental issues such as climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, resource consumption, species conservation and circular economy. Social refers to social issues around human rights and workplace practices. Governance relates to aspects such as ethical corporate management, anti-corruption, diversity in organizations and tax strategy. 

 

With the “Green Deal”, the European Union wants to make a strong push for sustainability in Europe. With the adoption of the European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the EU taxonomy for sustainable investment and business, the topic of ESG is coming directly to companies. As early as 2025, companies with 250 or more employees will fall under the new reporting requirements. New reporting requi­rements mean a combination of financial and non-financial reporting in the direction of uniform integrated reporting. The focus is on the management report, in which the main ESG reporting obligations are to be depicted. 

 

Companies are faced with the major challenge of creating the basis for trustworthy and therefore verifiable sustainability reporting. Although the focus is obviously on reporting, i.e. reporting in the management report, the core issue is the further development of finance and accounting to include non-financial accounting, so that the information required for the new reporting obligation can be generated efficiently in terms of pro­cesses. Integrated Reporting goes hand in hand with Integrated Accounting. ESG becomes an integral part of the modern CFO agenda!   

 

It is important for companies to take the topic of ESG seriously and to start preparing in good time. We see our role as auditors not only in the subsequent dutiful audit, but above all in the concrete support of our clients in coping with the complex requirements. We – Rödl & Partner – attach great importance to the topic of ESG. On the one hand, we ourselves fall under the new reporting requirements, and on the other hand, our clients expect us to be competent auditors and consultants. In addition, we expect that, next to technology, ESG has the greatest potential for change for us entrepreneurs. Here, too, the wheat will be separated from the chaff very quickly. 

 

With our new newsletter “ESG News” our auditing and consulting services will experience a further profes­sio­nalization. With our “ESG Day” and other events as well as the “ESG News”, we will keep you up to date from now on and provide you with concrete assistance and updates on all aspects of ESG.  We want you to be successful with ESG. Please contact me directly if you miss something or have suggestions for improvement.