Ana Diogo

In the past decade, sustainability has emerged as a core focus within the European research and development community, spurred by the European Commission’s introduction of new regulations through the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). Under the recently introduced European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), a significant number of companies, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), are mandated to produce regular and comprehensive information about their impacts and commitments toward sustainable development. This study provides an overview of the 100 biggest companies in the district of Leiria and the municipality of Ourém, Portugal, to evaluate how prepared they are to deliver their sustainability reportsSustainability reports next year. This chapter discusses this significant sustainability step, providing a framework to analyse the mandatory reports. Therefore, it addresses the lack of consensus on report guidance in the literature, undermining the knowledge about disclosure phenomena overall. Researchers have been focusing on sustainable, responsible investment disclosure and corporate governanceCorporate governance, and they are gradually including their impacts on sustainability. The CSRD can potentially overcome these conceptual issues, promoting positive social and environmental effects. In this sense, a systematic perspective was adopted to verify if prior reports have aspects related to the three categories of ESRS. The assumption is that the degree of previous information existence could enable compliance with the ESRD. The resultant description can reveal latent aspects of each company context, allowing inferences about their degree of compliance and the amount of effort needed to ensure it. At the time of this survey in the second half of 2024, it was found that less than half of the companies were aligned with the CSRD. Therefore, this paper highlights the lack of readiness among companies in the district of Leiria and the municipality of Ourém to fully comply with the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). This suggests a significant gap in corporate governanceCorporate governance structures and the public disclosure of sustainability data. There is a need for greater clarity and guidance so that companies can avoid disclosure issues and practices such as greenwashing. In addition, the results point to the urgent need for training and support to help companies adapt to these new regulatory requirements.