Why we need a more connected corporate reporting system

Discussions with business leaders at the Forum's Sustainable Development Impact Meetings last month highlighted the ongoing challenges of corporate reporting. As companies navigate climate change, nature loss, geopolitical uncertainty and resource constraints, sustainability-related information is becoming increasingly important for decisions about strategy, investment and long-term growth.

However, the systems used to produce this information remain fragmented, amid overlapping requests, diverging standards and inconsistent measurement approaches.

The WEF’s Global Risks Report 2026, published in January, underscored that environmental and sustainability-related risks will continue to dominate the long-term risk landscape over the next decade.

In September, this was reconfirmed with the publication of the report Risk Management Reimagined: Outlook to 2035. It highlighted that these are no longer short-term temporal risks; rather, they should now be weighed as structural, long-term risks alongside geoeconomic fragmentation, technological disruption, cyber insecurity, climate volatility and societal polarization.

This increases the need for relevant information that helps companies understand how these risks may affect their operations, resilience and long-term prospects.

However, challenges include not only the volume of information requested, but also whether it is relevant, reliable and useful for the decisions businesses and stakeholders need to make.

A more connected reporting system could strengthen the flow of information from disclosure to decision-making, enabling companies to identify risks earlier, understand opportunities and make better-informed choices about strategy, investment and long-term growth.

The business conversation is shifting from whether sustainability matters, to how sustainability-related information can inform decisions about capital allocation, risk management, operations and competitive advantage.

The objective is to produce the strategic intelligence that helps companies identify risks earlier, understand opportunities and strengthen resilience. A globally aligned reporting baseline can help support this by creating a common foundation for information that is comparable, reliable and relevant across diverse markets.

The reporting landscape is rapidly developing, but not coherently.

Multinational corporations operating across markets must navigate several systems at once, leading to overlapping requests, different definitions and metrics, duplicated data collection and higher reporting costs, which demand greater internal reporting capacity and infrastructure.

More than 45 jurisdictions and counting, representing approximately 60% of global gross domestic product, are adopting or in the process of adopting the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) standards.

While this direction signals a growing baseline, jurisdiction-specific approaches and requirements create local variations to reflect policy priorities and stakeholder needs.

In the European Union (EU), the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive requires in-scope companies to report under the European Sustainability Reporting Standards, which can extend to non-EU entities with significant operations in member states.

These overlaps illustrate the practical complexity companies face as reporting requirements expand across jurisdictions and frameworks.

The challenge is not to eliminate all jurisdictional differences, but to ensure that different reporting systems can work together and be interoperable, so companies can meet local requirements while producing information that remains comparable and useful across all applicable markets.

The WEF report Reporting for Business Resilience: Enhancing the Corporate Reporting System identifies three priorities for strengthening the corporate reporting system:

The first priority is wider adoption of the ISSB standards by jurisdictions, with modifications kept to a minimum wherever possible.

The number of jurisdictions adopting or taking steps to adopt the ISSB continues to grow across regions, increasingly moving beyond voluntary use as jurisdictions incorporate them into national legal and regulatory frameworks.

Moving toward a common baseline, with shared definitions, disclosure requirements and metrics, can help businesses and providers of financial capital use sustainability-related information as strategic intelligence to assess risks, identify opportunities and strengthen resilience.

For companies, it could also clarify what information needs to be collected, governed and connected to existing financial and management reporting processes, reducing the need to reconcile different requirements across markets.

The second priority is greater interoperability between reporting frameworks and jurisdictional requirements. Collaborative efforts among standard-setting bodies have already produced practical guidance to clarify where frameworks align and how multiple systems can be applied more efficiently.

The International Sustainability Standards Board and the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group have developed interoperability guidance to help companies understand how to apply the ISSB Standards and European Sustainability Reporting Standards together.

Passporting arrangements could build on these interoperability efforts by allowing information prepared under the ISSB Standards to be accepted as meeting equivalent requirements in another jurisdiction, either in full or alongside additional disclosures needed to address local objectives.

Japan has been cited as an early example, allowing foreign entities to use the ISSB Standards to meet local reporting requirements.

The usefulness of disclosure also depends on the quality of the underlying data. When companies are subject to different reporting requirements and use different data sources, organizational boundaries and assumptions, the resulting information can vary in scope and quality.

This can make reported information difficult to compare and undermine confidence in its reliability. Companies also face the need to manage multiple approaches to measuring similar matters, creating additional effort without necessarily improving the usefulness of the information.

Therefore, there is a need to harmonize measurement methodologies for environmental and social matters, to support the application of the ISSB standards. The harmonization efforts of the GHG Protocol and ISO illustrate the value of common measurement approaches.

More consistent methodologies can improve the credibility and comparability of emissions data, while helping companies, investors and regulators make better-informed assessments.

Ultimately, these three priorities reinforce each other. Companies will need appropriate guidance, capacity and practical implementation support. Collaboration between standard-setters, regulators and market participants is essential.

Together, they can help create a reporting system that gives decision-makers clearer insight into how sustainability-related matters affect business performance, resilience and long-term value.