The majority of large companies are well prepared for the advent of mandatory reporting on sustainability, according to the 2024 edition of KPMG’s Survey of Sustainability Reporting.

The research shows that sustainability reporting has become part of business as usual for almost all (95 per cent) of the world’s largest 250 companies, and a majority of the top 100 companies in each country, territory or jurisdiction.

The last two years have seen significant increases in the proportion of companies publishing carbon reduction targets and although lower, the number of companies reporting on biodiversity has similarly increased since 2022.

Internally, leadership pay has been related to sustainability in 41 per cent of these global 250 companies, and 56 per cent have a ‘sustainability leader’.

Nearly four-fifths of the top 250 companies use materiality assessments (defining the social and environmental topics that matter most to the business and stakeholders) with the larger more likely to use double materiality processes that assess both impacts on society and the environment and how this affects their financial performance. Double materiality is a cornerstone of compliance with the EU’s CSRD.

Despite progress to mandatory reporting, currently voluntary guidelines and standards remain widely used, with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) the most popular standard, but as reporting will soon be mandatory in some jurisdictions, including the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), this is a transitional arrangement and will be superseded by a requirement in most places.

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