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IFRS Foundation Announces International Sustainability Standards Board

As world leaders meet in Glasgow for COP26, the UN global summit to address the critical and urgent issue of climate change, the IFRS Foundation Trustees announce three significant developments to provide the global financial markets with high-quality disclosures on climate and other sustainability issues:

• The formation of a new International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) to develop—in the public interest—a comprehensive global baseline of high-quality sustainability disclosure standards to meet investors’ information needs;

• A commitment by leading investor-focused sustainability disclosure organizations to consolidate into the new board. The IFRS Foundation will complete consolidation of the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB—an initiative of CDP) and the Value Reporting Foundation (VRF—which houses the Integrated Reporting Framework and the SASB Standards) by June 2022;

• The publication of prototype climate and general disclosure requirements developed by the Technical Readiness Working Group (TRWG), a group formed by the IFRS Foundation Trustees to undertake preparatory work for the ISSB. These prototypes are the result of six months of joint work by representatives of the CDSB, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), the VRF and the World Economic Forum, supported by the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) and its Technical Expert Group of securities regulators. The TRWG has consolidated key aspects of these organizations' content into an enhanced, unified set of recommendations for consideration by the ISSB.

Together, these developments create the necessary institutional arrangements, set out in the Foundation’s revised Constitution, and lay the technical groundwork for a global sustainability disclosure standard-setter for the financial markets. They fulfil the growing and urgent demand for streamlining and formalizing corporate sustainability disclosures. Many investors and regulators have recently called for the IFRS Foundation to use its experience in creating accounting standards used in more than 140 jurisdictions to bring globally comparable reporting on sustainability matters to the financial markets.

The ISSB will sit alongside and work in close cooperation with the IASB, ensuring connectivity and compatibility between IFRS Accounting Standards and the ISSB’s standards—IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards. To ensure public interest legitimacy, both boards will be overseen by the Trustees, who are in turn accountable to a Monitoring Board of capital market authorities responsible for corporate reporting in their jurisdictions. The ISSB and the IASB will be independent, and their standards will complement each other to provide comprehensive information to investors and other providers of capital.