Readiness for the Danish Listed Companies of the C25-Index to CSRD: An Examination of Whether Current Sustainability Reports Meets the Requirements of the New CSRD-Directive

Abstract

Sustainability has been at the centre of attention for multiple years now, resulting in increasing ex-pectations from society and its stakeholders for all companies to run their business in a sustainable manner. Over the years many initiatives for the sustainability reporting have been formed. The lat-est addition to the sustainability reporting has come in the form of a directive from the EU, the CSRD directive. The directive sets the framework for extensive future regulation for sustainability reporting for companies in the EU. As a result of the directive a new regulation for sustainability reporting, the European Sustainability Reporting Standard (ESRS), has been drafted. ESRS com-prehend of 12 new standards with 82 disclosure requirements and 1.144 datapoints and is set take effect for the biggest companies for financial years starting the first of January 2024.

This dissertation investigates whether the large Danish listed companies of the C25-index meet the upcoming requirements in the new regulation. The study explores the published sustainability re-porting for 3 selected companies of the C25-index for the period 2020-2022. The dissertation is based on empirical data using a content analysis on the selected companies’ annual and ESG re-ports. The purpose of the content analysis was to determine the degree of reporting in line with the upcoming disclosure requirements over the period. The degree of alignment was investigated at the level of the 12 standards, the 82 disclosure requirements and the 30 mandatory disclosure require-ments. This allowed this dissertation to identify whether the investigated companies are ready for the new requirements and if they have been trying to prepare over the last few years.

For all the investigated companies the analysis showed that the reporting alignment increased every year in the analysed timeframe, indicating that the Danish companies of the C25-index has been preparing for the upcoming requirements. The analysis identified a positive tendency regarding the degree of reporting alignment on all three levels with the highest degree being for the mandatory disclosure requirements. But with an average of 60% in 2022 for the mandatory disclosure require-ments and 51% for the total of disclosure requirements this dissertation can conclude that the Dan-ish companies of the C25-index are not ready for the upcoming requirements yet. They still have some work to do be able to report completely aligned with the new regulation in 2025 on data col-lected in 2024.