The next phase of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive extends reporting obligations to additional undertakings, including certain third-country groups that operate in the EU through subsidiaries or branches above defined thresholds. The expansion broadens the assurance perimeter well beyond the first cohort of large EU public-interest entities.
For multinational groups the practical consequence is that consolidated sustainability data, prepared to the European Sustainability Reporting Standards, must be assembled for operations previously out of scope. The data architecture, double-materiality assessment, and limited-assurance requirements impose lead-time that finance and sustainability functions are now scrambling to cover.
The interaction with adjacent regimes matters. Disclosures intersect with the EU Taxonomy and, for some groups, with deforestation and supply-chain due-diligence obligations, so duplicative data calls are best rationalised into a single controlled reporting pipeline rather than addressed piecemeal.