When a company confronts reporting of their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics for the first time, an aspect of the process looms large in the background: the need to seek assurance.
Rules like the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and Securities and Exchange Commission’s climate-related disclosure proposal each carry requirements that companies receive a level of assurance from a third-party source on the information being reported. That assurance mandate might be defined as the more thorough “reasonable” or the less rigorous “limited,” depending on the regulation.
