This article provides an overview of the International Sustainability Standards Board's inaugural sustainability disclosure standards. The standards are a significant step towards the development of a global baseline of corporate reporting standards on sustainability and climate change, integrated with financial reporting standards.
This article discusses the UK Financial Conduct Authority's guidance setting out next steps to enhance sustainability reporting by listed companies.
While issuers continue to commit to sustainability/ESG objectives, for the first time since sustainability-linked bonds (SLBs) emerged, certain SLB issuers missed their sustainability targets in 2022 and early 2023. Further, market participants have recently expressed concerns about other SLB issuers in danger of not hitting their SPTs and, in general, about the credibility of SLBs in light of issuer ambitions and incentives to achieve sustainability targets. Issuers should consider the ambitiousness of their sustainability targets, any challenges in achieving the targets on schedule, and how they will prove their progress. In this resource, Latham & Watkins provides 10 takeaways relating to these developments for potential SLB issuers and their underwriters.
This article discusses the European Commission's adopting the first set of EU Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). The ESRS are mandatory common standards by which in-scope companies must report comparable, consistent and detailed information across environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.
Learn how Boards can be drivers of ESG in organizations.
Can companies collaborate in the interests of environmental sustainability agreements without breaching competition law in the UK? This important question is tackled by draft guidance published by the Competition and Markets Authority (“CMA”) on 28 February 2023 (“guidance”). The guidance sets out the CMA’s proposed approach to how agreements between competitors in relation to environmental sustainability will be assessed and aims to provide businesses with clarity and comfort on the CMA’s enforcement approach to encourage such initiatives to be progressed. The guidance aligns with the important role the CMA considers it has to play in tackling climate change, as noted in a recent statement by the CMA’s CEO on 25 January 2023.
Learn about key trends and considerations around ESG policies in business supply chains.
In 2021, in the context of the common agricultural policy reform 2023-2027, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union adopted a new exemption from competition rules for certain agricultural products. Specifically, Article 210a of Regulation 1308/2013 establishing a common organisation of the markets in agricultural products (“CMO Regulation”) introduced an exclusion from the prohibition against anti-competitive agreements (or “cartels”) for certain restrictive agreements in the agricultural sector when those agreements are indispensable to achieve sustainability standards. In this latest development, on 10 January 2023, the European Commission (“Commission”) published for consultation its draft guidelines on how this exclusion should apply. The Guidelines seek to clarify how operators active in the agri-food sector can design joint sustainability initiatives in line with Article 210a.
This article discusses issues such as falling share prices in response to labor disputes, “living wage” resolutions at AGMs, stakeholder concerns over working conditions in supply chains, and workers speaking up about their employer’s culture and ethics, which potentially engage the EU’s new sustainability reporting duty.