“Starting from January, we have the CSRD directive implemented in the national legislation. We also have the first companies that started preparing for sustainability reporting. It is the first year in which large companies, with over 500 employees, must submit this sustainability report in 2025.

From the estimates made in Romania, we will have approximately 5,000 – 6,000 companies that will have to report on sustainability criteria in the second wave.

How prepared are the companies? Here the answer is relative because from our experience, it differs a lot depending on the size of the companies and the resources they have.

Studies show that 70 percent of Romanian companies are aware of the sustainability report requirements, but only 30 percent are prepared for sustainability reporting,” Ana-Maria Iordache, Partner, D&B David and Baias said during Sustainability in Business Forum organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest and Sustainability Today.

“Preparation is very important, because the report itself is the final stage. Until we reach the finish, we have a lot of actions to do. We discuss a lot in general terms, principles are good, ideas are welcome, but effective sustainability reporting requires details.

The sustainability report must be made based on European sustainability standards, which oblige us to have policies, procedures, goals, actions, targets that we must set. From this perspective, what we see in the companies that have already initiated the preparation process for the purpose of reporting on sustainability criteria, is that they have challenges from this perspective, such as the lack of resources, but also from the perspective of the data collection method, because we are talking about a significant volume of data that must be collected, structured and centralized.

We are still at the beginning, it is the first year of this structured reporting and we do not yet have a vision from the perspective of sustainability and a structured strategy, and this is another challenging element for Romanian companies that are in this preparation process.

Perhaps the most interesting element of the sustainability report comes after the completion of the report, respectively in the audit process. The auditor who will verify the report will check the entire documentation that is the basis of the report. Companies must be very careful in preparing documentation for reporting purposes.

Companies are eager to take important steps towards sustainability reporting, but there is still a lot of work to be done.

Companies should form an ESG, sustainability, implementation and reporting team for ESG factors. The formation of such a team is in itself a process because we cannot nominate someone who seems less busy and who could collect some data and then draw up a sustainability report.

In our view, there should be a member of the board to supervise this concept of sustainability, the implementation of sustainability factors and the fulfilment of targets. Depending on the size of the company, it is possible to need a sustainability committee or a team of sustainability managers.”