ESRS 1 General Requirements

The ESRS 1 General Requirements establish the overarching principles, drafting conventions, and foundational requirements for the preparation and presentation of sustainability statements under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

ESRS 1 applies to all undertakings within scope and shall be applied in conjunction with ESRS 2 General Disclosures and the relevant topical standards.

The primary objective of ESRS 1 is to ensure that undertakings provide a fair presentation of their material sustainability-related impacts, risks and opportunities, in accordance with the double materiality principle. This requires reporting from both an impact materiality perspective—focusing on effects on people and the environment—and a financial materiality perspective—focusing on sustainability-related risks and opportunities that may affect financial performance, position, cash flows, or access to finance over the short, medium and long term.

ESRS 1 sets out mandatory requirements for determining material information, including the processes for assessing materiality, the inclusion of upstream and downstream value chain information, and the use of reasonable and supportable information available without undue cost or effort.

It also defines qualitative characteristics that reported information shall meet, namely relevance, faithful representation, comparability, verifiability, and understandability.

Furthermore, ESRS 1 specifies requirements on reporting boundaries, time horizons, comparative information, the treatment of uncertainties and errors, and the structure and connectivity of sustainability information within the management report.

Where ESRS topical standards do not sufficiently cover an undertaking’s material impacts, risks or opportunities, ESRS 1 requires the development of entity-specific disclosures to ensure decision-useful information for users of general-purpose sustainability statements.