Biodiversity is among the biggest concerns for companies grappling with corporate disclosures, with a quarter of them lacking confidence in their ability to meet the requirements set out by the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), a PwC survey has revealed.

The consultancy firm has released its 2024 Global CSRD Survey, addressing over 500 executives and experts across more than 30 countries and territories.

According to the analysis, respondents reported high levels of confidence on topics that are generally included in existing disclosures – such as workforce (96%), business conduct (94%), and climate change (94%) – while feeling far less confident in their ability to meet disclosing requirements on less familiar topics, including biodiversity and ecosystems.

The level of confidence in reporting on biodiversity is relatively low compared to other topics, with only 62% of companies expressing certainty that they will meet the reporting requirements – the lowest figure among those listed in the survey.

Approximately 13% of the respondents indicated that they are “not very” or “not at all” confident when it comes to reporting on biodiversity, while the remaining 25% did not provide a response.

Source: PwC

Around 60% of the surveyed firms are headquartered within the European Union, and almost 50% have annual revenues of over $1 billion.

Under the EU’s CSRD, more than 50,000 organisations globally will need to start disclosing information about their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices from 2025, with the 12 European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) setting out the technical rules.

The survey also showed that companies are facing multiple barriers to CSRD implementation. The biggest obstacle identified by respondents was data availability and quality, along with the complexity of their value chains.

Around 59% of companies face “large” or “very large” data-related challenges, while 27% consider such obstacles “moderate” and 10% “limited”.

Source: PwC

“The CSRD’s requirement to look across the value chain presents an additional data-related challenge,” the survey said.

“Often for the first time, companies must use data from suppliers, customers, and third-party data providers, and they need to assess their reliability.”

While this challenge refers to all topics, knowledge gaps are widely recognised as one of the key problems related to corporate nature-related disclosures, as biodiversity still lacks a reliable and robust data infrastructure due to funding shortfalls or technical issues.

According to a study published in April in the Journal of Cleaner Production, the most commonly used tools to measure corporate impacts on biodiversity “insufficiently addressed” Global Biodiversity Framework targets on a number of metrics, including ecosystem integrity, nature-based solutions, sea use change, and aquatic biodiversity.

By Giada Ferraglioni – giada@carbon-pulse.com

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