- The Spanish UNE, European EN and international ISO and IEC standards facilitate organisations' progress on ESG (environmental, social and governance) objectives, while enabling them to improve the robustness and impact of their reporting.
- Including the use of standards in sustainability reporting makes it easier for organisations to demonstrate their performance while providing their investors and stakeholders with information on a sound and recognised basis.
- European and international standard-setting bodies work with the entities that define reporting frameworks, such as EFRAG and IFRS, to facilitate the recognition of the standards in these frameworks as useful tools for both reporting companies and verifiers of this sustainability information.
Madrid, 23 January 2024 – The Spanish Association for Standardization, UNE, has drawn up the report 'Apoyo de las normas para el reporte ESG' (Supporting standards for ESG reporting) with the aim of helping Spanish organisations to comply with the sustainability reporting obligations of the corporate sustainability reporting directive (CSRD) with regard to environmental, social and governance aspects, as well as the entities that must verify this information.
The Spanish UNE, European EN and international ISO and IEC standards help organisations further their ESG goals while improving the soundness and reliability of their reporting.
Including the use of these standards as part of the ESG report provides investors and stakeholders with sustainability information on a solid and recognised basis. It also facilitates the work of the verifiers and auditors of this information.
Javier García, Director General of UNE, Vice-President of ISO and member of the CEN Board of Directors, underlined the essential role of standards in sustainability reporting. "Standardisation is implementing various actions aimed at reinforcing the reliability of these reports, while improving consistency with other obligations that organisations have in this area of sustainability", he said.
Javier García explained that “one of these actions is the establishment of collaboration agreements between the entities that define these reporting frameworks and European and international standardisation bodies. The collaboration that has been established between EFRAG and CEN-CENELEC and between IFRS and ISO facilitates the recognition of standards as tools for organisations to make progress on ESG matters. This recognition builds on the efforts companies are already making by using standards as an element to comply with different sustainability-related legislation, avoiding the duplication of work and improving the coherence of this legislative framework".
This publication includes a representative compilation of existing standards in the ESG field with the aim of encouraging organisations to use the standards to support this reporting and to present information (data, policies, actions, results) based on them. In addition, it provides a number of elements that support this approach and the benefits for both the reporting organisations and the parties in charge of verifying the sustainability information provided.
Specifically, this document focuses mainly on standards aimed at the organisation itself. The standards included facilitate strategy design, policy definition and decision-making and are generally applicable to organisations of all types, regardless of their size, activity or public or private nature.
