On 24 February 2021, the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) issued a press release following a board meeting in which it discussed the progress made over the past year by its Sustainable Finance Task Force (STF).
In the statement the ISOCO board identifies three priority areas for improvement in sustainability-related disclosures by companies and asset managers:
- Encouraging globally consistent standards. To encourage progress towards globally consistent application of a common set of international standards for sustainability-related disclosure across jurisdictions, covering the breadth of sustainability topics and leveraging existing principles, frameworks, and guidance.
- Promoting comparable metrics and narratives. To promote greater emphasis on industry-specific, quantitative metrics in companies’ sustainability-related disclosures and standardization of narrative information.
- Coordinating across approaches. To drive international consistency of sustainability-related disclosures with a focus on enterprise value creation, including companies’ dependence on stakeholders and the external environment, while also supporting mechanisms to coordinate investors’ information needs on wider sustainability impacts – and (i) to promote closer integration of those two aspects with reporting under current accounting standards frameworks and (ii) facilitate independent assurance of companies’ disclosures.