IOSCO/MR/15/2024
Madrid, 24 September 2024
Almost 100 stakeholders involved in global sustainability standard setting, regulation, and accounting came together as part of a high-level international event at the start of Climate Week NYC.
Entitled ‘Accelerating Climate and Sustainability-Related Disclosures: A Global Perspective’, the focus of discussions centered around how to advance global adoption and use of the ISSB Standards and build an understanding of sustainability disclosure assurance in its early days.
Since IOSCO’s endorsement of the Standards in July last year, more than 20 jurisdictions have taken steps to integrate them in their domestic regulatory regime; taken altogether, that is almost 55% of global GDP.
The conference provided a dynamic platform to further advance global standards for sustainability-related reporting and assurance, aligning them with the requirements of capital markets including regulators, investors and corporates, and elevating their maturity to be on a par with financial reporting. This event is an integral part of IOSCO’s objective to foster and contribute to a reporting ecosystem that promotes high quality, consistent, comparable sustainability information that is needed by global capital markets to make useful decisions.
Helping its members in their consideration of how to adopt, or be informed by, the ISSB Standards is a key focus for IOSCO. Given it’s membership regulates more than 95% of the world’s securities markets, IOSCO is well positioned to play this role.
Jean-Paul Servais, Chair of IOSCO, said: “Promoting high-quality sustainability-related reporting is one of the key priorities for IOSCO to protect investors against greenwashing. Global progress towards the introduction of sustainability disclosure requirements has been swift since IOSCO announced its endorsement of the first ISSB Standards in July 2023. IOSCO is committed to collaborate with the ISSB and other global stakeholders to deliver a comprehensive capacity building program to support the wider use of sustainability disclosures.
To underpin the trustworthiness and thus usefulness of the disclosures, IOSCO also encourages the global development of assurance standards by IAASB and IESBA, and welcomes IFAC’s work to help all users and practitioners better understand and prepare for what high-quality sustainability assurance will look like.
Our conference demonstrates our joint efforts to contribute to decision-useful sustainability information in the interest of investors.”
