ESG

The Financial Conduct Authority has changed course on one of the harder edges of its new sustainability reporting regime. When the regulator consulted on the rules earlier this year, it proposed requiring listed companies to comply with the UK’s climate disclosure standard, UK SRS S2. Broader sustainability reporting under UK SRS S1, along with Scope 3 emissions disclosures, would have been handled differently: comply with the requirements or explain why not.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed seven bills on September 21 establishing new requirements for data centers, including measures governing electricity costs, water-use disclosures, resource reporting and environmental review. The package is intended to give communities more information about proposed facilities while preventing the costs of serving them from being shifted onto ordinary utility customers.

New Zealand’s Financial Markets Authority has given a longer reprieve to climate reporting entities that were supposed to be on their way out of the country’s mandatory disclosure regime but, for now, remain caught inside it.

Sustainability reporting used to be a document. At many large companies, it is now an institution, with its own staff, calendar, controls, and internal audit trail. The 2026 edition of the State of Play study from the IFAC, AICPA, and CIMA found that 97 percent of the world's largest companies disclosed some form of sustainability information in 2024, and 75 percent obtained some level of third-party assurance over it, up from 73 percent the year before and just 51 percent in 2019, the first year the study ran.

More than a year after Brussels set out to make its sustainability reporting regime less burdensome, the revised European Sustainability Reporting Standards have made their way into the Official Journal. Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/1563 was published on September 21, replacing the existing ESRS annexes under Delegated Regulation (EU) 2023/2772. The regulation enters into force on November 10, 2026, and the revised standards will apply to financial years beginning on or after January 1, 2027.

ASIC has found an improvement in climate-related financial disclosures under Australia’s new mandatory sustainability reporting regime, although the regulator says companies still have work to do on some of the disclosures that demand the most judgment. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission reviewed a sample of 40 sustainability reports lodged for financial years ending Dec. 31, 2025. Its findings provide an early picture of what mandatory reporting has changed after years in which companies largely disclosed climate information voluntarily.

The Justice Department and Environmental Protection Agency have reached a proposed agreement requiring Environmental Resource Holdings to perform an estimated $125 million in work intended to move the long-running cleanup of New Jersey’s Lower Passaic River toward construction.