© Raw Film
More countries have either adopted or intend to adopt the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) guidelines, as more investors and regulators have recognised the importance of internationally standardised climate reporting, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Emmanuel Faber, chair of the ISSB, said that “an increasing number of regulators are seeing the policy rationale for the paced adoption of the ISSB standards to strengthen their jurisdiction’s access to capital and trade, allowing investors to make more informed investment decisions, and companies to attract capital”.
The International Financial Reporting Standards (IFSRS) Foundation, under which the ISSB standards are issued, announced that 36 jurisdictions have adopted the ISSB standards or are in the process incorporating them into their regulatory frameworks.
The standard-setting body also published a set of 17 jurisdictional profiles to provide greater transparency for regulators and investors about areas that have to some extent adopted ISSB standards, with 14 fully adopting the standards. The profiles include many countries in the global south, including Ghana, Bangladesh, Brazil, Malaysia and Chile. Hong Kong and Australia were also profiled.
High-level snapshots were also released of countries that are still developing their regulatory adoption of ISSB standards, which include China, Canada, the UK, Japan, Costa Rica, Switzerland and others.
Notably absent from the IFRS profiles are the US and the EU. While the EU’s sustainable reporting rules have interoperability with the ISSB standards, the ISSB chose not to profile the bloc due to the current omnibus proposal that could change those rules, said Sue Lloyd, vice chair of the ISSB.
“[The EU commission has] committed to reduce the number of data points, but they said, in so doing, that they wanted that to be done in a way which would further enhance interoperability with global standards. So we hope that provides the opportunity for the amendments to the omnibus to be done in a way that preserves the interoperability that we work so hard to achieve, and perhaps even enhances it. But we’ll have to wait and see what decisions are made,” Lloyd said.
Meanwhile, the US has pulled back from its own climate reporting rules. The US Securities and Exchange Commission left the ISSB soon after the regulator voted to end its defense of its own climate-risk disclosure rules passed in 2024.
But there is still strong investor interest in the US on sustainability information “including from the use of the ISSB standards”, said Lloyd.
“Many companies in the US in the past have chosen to use the sustainability accounting standards, board standards, voluntarily. So that sort of voluntary adoption momentum is something we still see from the company and the investor side,” she said.
While there are no national climate reporting rules, some US states have or are considering implementing standards. Some of those reference the ISSB standards, such as the California disclosure rule and a pending bill in New York that would also require emissions disclosures.
Pending legislation in other states including Illinois, New Jersey, and Colorado would require climate reporting but it is currently unclear if they would be compliant with ISSB standards.
This page was last updated June 16, 2025
Written by
Moriah Costa is the Editor-in-Chief of Green Central Banking and has over a decade of experience writing about banking and finance. She is an award-winning American journalist based in Paris and has written for major international publications, including Reuters, The Guardian, and S&P Global. Having grown up in water-stressed Arizona, she has always had a strong interest in bringing awareness to climate and environmental issues.
