It also stressed the importance of ensuring that the sustainability standards achieve greater interoperability between the ISSB’s proposed global baseline and jurisdiction-specific requirements. As part of this it agreed to use the materiality definition based on IAS 1 definition.

‘The ISSB is changing its description of materiality – not to change its intended meaning, but to avoid confusion. Future guidance will aim to clarify this and avoid companies taking too narrow an approach to identifying material information,’ said Tomokazu Sekiguchi, KPMG’s head of sustainability reporting & assurance.

During the board meeting in Montreal, the ISSB also responded to feedback to its recent standards consultant and confirmed that ‘it would be better to use appendices as implementation guidance, not requirements, although this will be introduced over time’.

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