Shift Submission to IFRS Consultation on a Sustainability Standards Board

In December 2020, Professor John Ruggie submitted his views to the IFRS Foundation for their consultation into the proposed establishment of a Sustainability Standards Board (SSB) to develop global reporting standards on sustainability. Professor Ruggie urged the Foundation not to limit the initial work of a future SSB to environmental issues and suggested that:

• The urgency of today’s inequality crisis, including environmental justice issues, requires a parallel effort to integrate the underlying human rights issues into a new standard-setter’s work.
• The IFRS Foundation take care to ensure that the framing and presentation of a new standard-setter are clear regarding the constraints of its mandate to issues that have demonstrated narrowly-defined financial materiality, and that they do not imply that it covers all sustainability issues of critical importance with regards to companies’ social and environmental performance.