Sustainability Moves in with Legal

Sustainability has never sat neatly on the corporate organizational chart. But in the past few years it has begun to drift in a distinct direction: as wide-ranging disclosure expectations give way to specific compliance obligations, the function is more engaged with legal and risk. Two independent datasets this week quantify this development.

G&A and Ropes & Gray have released Side by Side: Sustainability and Legal, based on a survey and interviews at 35 companies. It finds lean teams absorbing expanding compliance duties: of this pool, 39% of sustainability functions now report into legal, and 87% of sustainability leaders said regulation has increased their interactions with legal in the past year. No respondents expected that collaboration to diminish.

The Weinreb Group’s 2026 CSO report, covered by ESG Dive, paints a similar picture. CSOs reporting to legal have climbed from 3% in 2011 to 23%, while those reporting to the CEO have fallen from roughly a third to 14%. The number of CSOs dipped for the first time in 15 years, with headcount growing faster outside the function than inside.

Adding to the regulatory drive behind that shift, EFRAG has opened a consultation running to October 31 on its exposure draft of the CSRD standard for non-EU companies — the last piece of the directive to take effect, per its technical chair. As ESG Today reports, the draft covers impacts only, dropping the risks-and-opportunities reporting EU companies face, and offers a contested “mixed approach” letting groups report impacts either EU-only or globally. EFRAG members have warned that relevant information could be lost, which presents a greenwashing risk especially when it comes to harms that cross borders.

Meanwhile, in the area of convergence and consolidation, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol announced that it and the ISO standards organization will merge their corporate carbon accounting standards into a single co-branded standard. A consultation is planned for 2027. G&A’s Scope 3 and SBTi target-setting teams are tracking the drafts.

We are always watching for signs of whether developments in regulations and frameworks are yielding better information, rather than “fluff.” A University of Chicago Law School working paper covered by Trellis scored more than 15,000 disclosures from 2,100 companies between 1998 and 2023, finding that reporting surged after 2015 while specificity and quantitative content did not follow. One interpretation is that numerical results are getting “harder to find amid a faster-growing layer of narrative.” The authors conclude that for voluntary regimes to deliver on substance, they will need firmer signals of what good disclosure looks like, topic by topic.

Elsewhere: a Nature Sustainability perspective finds that accounting flexibility can swing reported emissions by roughly a factor of two; Singapore proposes ISSB-aligned standards while keeping Scope 3 largely voluntary; and EcoVadis opens its supply chain network to all suppliers.