The IFRS Foundation’s International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) announced the publication of the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Taxonomy (ISSB Taxonomy), a new digital tool aimed at enabling investors to analyze sustainability-related financial disclosures based on the ISSB’s recently released sustainability and climate-related reporting standards.

According to an IFRS statement announcing the new tool, the new Taxonomy “will enable investors to search, extract and compare sustainability-related financial disclosures as ISSB establishes its global baseline of Standards.”

The ISSB was launched in November 2021 at the COP26 climate conference, with the goal to develop IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards, driven by demand from investors, companies, governments and regulators to provide a global baseline of disclosure requirements enabling a consistent understanding of the effect of sustainability risks and opportunities on companies’ prospects. The board launched its inaugural general sustainability (IFRS 1) and climate (IFRS 2) reporting standards in June 2023, and the new standards are expected to inform emerging disclosure requirement systems from many regulators globally.

Following the launch of the standards, the ISSB published a proposed digital taxonomy reflecting the disclosure requirements in the first two standards, with the goal of facilitating structured digital reporting of sustainability-related financial information prepared using the standards, in order to improve accessibility and comparability of the reported information for investors.

Similar to the IFRS Accounting Taxonomy used for financial reporting, the taxonomy is a classification system, composed of a set of XBRL files used to identify and structure information to make the information easy to find, and to facilitate communication between preparers and users of the disclosures. The taxonomies enable information to be tagged and exchanged in a structured format to be accessed and processed easily and efficiently.

The IFRS added that the new taxonomy is designed to be consistent with its IFRS Accounting Taxonomy, enabling companies to provide a holistic reporting package to investors, and to enable use with other digital taxonomies.

ISSB Chair Emmanuel Faber said:

“As jurisdictions around the world are considering the adoption or other use of ISSB Standards, the publication of the ISSB Taxonomy only a few months after the effective date of our inaugural Standards is critical to support capital market transparency and efficiency and enable companies and investors to digitally process sustainability-related financial disclosures provided through use of the ISSB Standards.”

Click here to access the ISSB’s new IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Taxonomy.