23. Corporate Sustainability Reporting in Europe: Stakes and Perspectives

The effect of climate change, as evidenced by repeated droughts, flash floods, gigantic fires, and hurricanes, combined with increasingly stringent environmental protection regulations, has a growing impact on how business is conducted in Europe. Integrating sustainability into corporate business models is even becoming necessary to ensure firms’ long-term viability, particularly in highly polluting sectors such as energy, plastics, mineral extraction, and construction. European companies also need to adapt their management to structural and impactful changes, including the search for meaning in work after the COVID-19 crisis and employment tensions in certain sectors of activity. Growing stakeholders’ expectations regarding leveraging good environmental and social practices accelerate this trend. At the same time, with the advent of European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) and the application of the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D), a company's borders are increasingly being crossed. Managers must engage in in-depth dialogue with their stakeholders, suppliers (upstream value chain), and customers (downstream value chain) to monitor their environmental and human rights practices. …