Twenty-Eight Jurisdictions, One Missing Name

As of April 2026, twenty-eight jurisdictions have adopted the ISSB’s sustainability disclosure standards on a voluntary or mandatory basis. A further twelve are planning to. South Korea, Japan, and the United Kingdom have all issued domestic versions. The S&P Global report tracking this progress runs to several thousand words.

It does not mention GRI once.

Charles noticed immediately. You cannot ignore what’s going on on the GRI side,” he said.

The omission is not minor. GRI, the Global Reporting Initiative, is the oldest and most established sustainability standard setter in the world, founded in 1997 and still the most widely used voluntary framework globally. Charles sits on its Global Sustainability Standards Board.

The omission tells you something about where the financial establishment’s attention is pointed. It also reveals the tension the article otherwise avoids.

Two Standards, Two Philosophies

Charles is Professor of Sustainability Accounting and the Erivan K. Haub Chair in Business and Sustainability at the Schulich School of Business, York University. He has spent more than twenty years researching social and environmental accounting and corporate reporting standards. Before academia he worked at KPMG.

His position inside this debate is specific. He is an accounting scholar who believes the accounting system has been pointed at the wrong question.

The tension between ISSB and GRI is philosophical, not technical. ISSB standards are financially oriented. They ask: how does the environment affect the company? The intended audience is investors. GRI standards ask the opposite: how does the company affect the world? The intended audience is society.

“You can see that it’s a very different type of reporting,” Charles said, “when you ask a company to report on what are you doing to address the issue that you are causing to the planet, versus what are you doing about the issues that the planet is creating on your business.”

The S&P article documents a world in which the ISSB framework is gaining significant institutional traction. It does not address what that framing choice excludes.

A Framework Adopted in Forty Different Ways

The headline claim is that ISSB adoption is accelerating. The detail beneath it is more complicated. South Korea declined to issue a third standard permitting additional sustainability disclosures, citing corporate burden. Japan added requirements for disaggregated Scope 3 emissions not found in the ISSB framework. The UK made its standards voluntary, with mandatory application for listed companies proposed from January 2027, and indefinite waivers on Scope 3 and non-climate reporting.

The US is frozen. The SEC’s climate disclosure rules have not gone into effect. The SEC has told a court it does not intend to defend them.

The consistency and comparability that investors called for is emerging more slowly than the headline adoption numbers suggest.

We Are So Into the Tree We Cannot See the Forest

This is the point at which Charles moves from the technical to the structural.

“We are so into the tree, we don’t see the forest.”

The sustainability accounting community debates which standards are better, which frameworks capture more, which exemptions are acceptable.

“We fight over reporting standards, which is ridiculous. We are far away from actual performance and action.”

His position is not that standards are useless. Reporting standards make companies more accountable. But accountability for what you disclose is not the same as accountability for what you do. A company that reports its emissions accurately and completely has not thereby reduced them. The system in which it operates was designed to maximise profit. Reporting on how it does that, however transparently, does not change the design.

The standards debate, conducted at high volume over many years, generates its own white noise. It allows those comfortable with the current system to point to complexity as evidence that reporting remains a work in progress. Meanwhile, production continues.

The Magic Wand and What It Would Actually Require

Charles’s answer is direct.

“I would change the capitalist system. I would change how the incentives are designed.”

The legal route is a globally ratified revision of fiduciary duty, moving it away from shareholder return toward broader stakeholder accountability. Some jurisdictions are moving in that direction. Europe has gone furthest on social and environmental standards, though political currents are shifting. He finds unexpected hope in Asian countries with a people-first cultural orientation, and in African countries already living with the consequences of emissions they did not produce.

“That’s the key,” he said, on whether such change would need to be globally coordinated. It would.

The ISSB is spreading. The system it measures is not changing. Whether better standards accelerate structural change, or substitute for it, is the open question the episode leaves intact.