Survey results on environmental indicators from the ESRS: Materiality, experience and expectations

Background: The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) demands companies to report in accordance with a set of European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). The first group of reporting companies will begin for the fiscal year 2024 with first reports in 2025, the second group for 2025 and the third for 2026 onwards. To provide insights to support the implementation of this directive, a survey of companies operating in Norway on their relationship with environmental indicators from the standards was conducted in spring 2024.
Method: A representative sample of indicators from the standards were picked. Then the survey investigated: 1. Which of these the companies considered material. 2. What experience they had with measuring each material indicators. 3. How challenging they expected each material indicator to be to measure going forward.
The sample of repondents was gathered though self-selection sampling by advertising for the study among the contacts of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at NTNU in Norway. The sample is thus not a probability sample, and the results should not be used for direct statistical inference. The survey therefore also mapped the respondents demographics, by asking them for their sector, value chain position, and which reporting group they pertained to. For more information, await the future linked research article.
Results: Results are given in the Microsoft Excel file. This also contains the included indicators and explanations for variables and categories.