Below is an excerpt from ISS-Corporate’s recently released paper “Responsible Business Conduct: Meeting the Challenge of Increasing Regulations”. The full paper is available for download from the ISS-Corporate online library.
As new corporate sustainability regulations come into force around the world, companies are grappling to broaden the scope of their environmental and social strategies to comply with the new requirements. This requires them to identify, understand, and report on a variety of risks related to responsible business conduct.
New laws, such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), are formally adopting the principles of responsible conduct introduced by frameworks such as the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and UN Global Compact Principles. ISS-Corporate has analyzed data from the ISS ESG Newsroom and Norm-Based Research (NBR) datasets to review how information related to news and controversies can help companies assess risk related to new regulatory requirements, as these datasets are based on the same normative frameworks that form the foundations for recent legislation. Corporate involvement in potential failures to respect established norms of responsible business conduct are researched and tracked as NBR controversy cases,[1] which are updated as situations evolve. The EU CSRD and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) are perhaps the most comprehensive regulatory efforts currently addressing responsible corporate behavior. As shown in the table below, ISS-Corporate mapped out key themes covered under the NBR methodology and how they connect to the key disclosure areas per the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) under the CSRD.
Source: ISS ESG Norm-Based Research, as of May 31, 2024
[1] Throughout this publication, the term “case” refers to an instance of potential failures to respect established norms of responsible business conduct as recorded and researched according to the ISS ESG Norm-Based Research methodology.
By: Elias Siebert, Senior Associate, Product Manager, ISS-Corporate
