Early Evidence of Latvian Large Organisations’ Readiness for Regulatory Sustainability Reporting

Abstract

In September 2024, the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) was transposed into the Latvian Sustainability Information Disclosure Law (Law). The law introduces new requirements for 296 large organisations to include a sustainability report (SR) prepared following European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) as a part of their management report in the annual report. The aim of this research is to understand the readiness of the Latvian market to ensure ESRS reporting. Thus, early in 2024, which is the first reporting year, the author performed the interpretive field study by conducting twelve semi-structured interviews with SR experts. The results revealed that data availability and quality are the main challenges when preparing the ESRS report. Experts suggested that ESRS reporting requires the introduction of regular sustainability accounting as an extension of conventional accounting and building enhanced sustainability data analytics for evidence-based decision-making. Conclusions show that to establish a transparent and cohesive approach to ESRS reporting, it is necessary to have an automated sustainability reporting system that embraces an assemblage of organisational sustainability and digitalisation. The recommendation for the management is to start early preparation and build robust internal big data analytics capability (BDAC) to guarantee a more cost-efficient approach to ESRS reporting.