CSRD sets the legal obligation, but it doesn't tell a company precisely what to disclose. That job belongs to the European Sustainability Reporting Standards, or ESRS. EFRAG built these standards to turn a fairly broad legal directive into something companies could actually action, item by item.

How the Standards Are Organized

There are twelve standards in total, split into two groups.

Two of them are cross-cutting, meaning they apply to every company in scope, no exceptions:

• ESRS 1 covers general requirements: the reporting principles, the double materiality process, and how far into the value chain a company needs to look.
• ESRS 2 covers general disclosures, organized around four pillars: how the report was prepared, governance, strategy, and the policies/actions/metrics/targets that tie it all together.

The other ten are topical, and only apply if the materiality assessment flags them as relevant:

• Environmental: E1 (Climate), E2 (Pollution), E3 (Water), E4 (Biodiversity), E5 (Circular Economy)
• Social: S1 (Own Workforce), S2 (Value Chain Workers), S3 (Affected Communities), S4 (Consumers)
• Governance: G1 (Business Conduct)

It Got Simpler Recently

Anyone who looked at ESRS a year or two ago and felt overwhelmed will be relieved to hear it's been trimmed down considerably. Following Omnibus I, the standard now covers roughly 300 datapoints (down from close to 1,000), and the sector-specific standards that were once planned have been scrapped entirely.

That reduction helps, but 300 datapoints is still a lot to track by hand across a full reporting year. At BUME, we map each one directly into our data model, so once your materiality assessment is done, it's immediately clear what actually needs to be measured and where the data has to come from.