Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) has urged the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) to prioritise consistency, comparability, and proportionality in its revisions to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions disclosure standards.
In a joint response to the ISSB’s Exposure Draft on amendments to IFRS S2, NBIM’s Carine Smith Ihenacho, chief governance and compliance officer, and Jeanne Stampe, lead policy adviser, welcomed the drive to streamline Scope 3 emissions disclosures, but cautioned against changes that could undermine coherence or comparability across jurisdictions and sectors.
As chair of the ISSB’s Investor Advisory Group, NBIM’s response carries significant weight.
The €1.6trn Norwegian sovereign wealth fund went on to say that “reliable, consistent, and comparable financial information across global capital markets” is fundamental to investor decision-making.
NBIM’s response, which comes at a time when climate-related financial disclosures are becoming increasingly integral to asset allocation, argues that the ISSB final standards will only gain traction if they meet the fundamental needs of investors – namely, that sustainability reporting must serve investors through consistent and comparable data.
On the importance of investor-related disclosure, the NBIM duo wrote: “We strongly support the ISSB standards as the global baseline of investor-focused standards for sustainability-related financial disclosures.”
In their response, Smith Ihenacho and Stampe went on to say that they backed strengthened requirements around how exclusions are calculated and disclosed, urging that reporting is done in a way that maintains connectivity between sustainability and financial disclosures.
“This enables us to formulate a holistic view of a company’s performance and prospects over time, and inform our investment decisions, risk management processes and ownership activities,” they added.
The senior NBIM figures also flagged inconsistencies in how asset classes are addressed across sectors and recommended formal definitions to prevent fragmentation and reporting gaps.
Crucially, they emphasised that exceptions to Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) classifications or the GHG Protocol should only be permitted under defined regulatory obligations and with appropriate disclosures, and warned against “indefinite discretion”, which “risks undermining global harmonisation efforts”.
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