Any ESG consultants out there? Are you drowning with CSRD and ISSB driven work?

[u/IMicrowaveSteak]

2 years ago I was clocking 70-80 hours a week minimum doing double materiality assessments and ESRS gap assessment work.

It’s not quite right back to what it was, but I sense q4 I’ll be doing a lot of sustainability software implementation work and all next year will be companies at various stages of DMA refresh, IRO Mapping, either aligning to the revised ESRS or me doing conversions from the old to the new. Then XBRL tagging and EU Taxonomy work.

Then layer it all with every version of ISSB under the sun in statutory filings.

Anyone else work in this realm?

[u/VoiderElf]

Different picture here in Brazil. We were expecting 2026 to be the year of IFRS S1/S2 projects, since the CVM (our securities regulator, roughly the equivalent of the SEC) had made ISSB-based reporting mandatory for listed companies. Then the CVM rolled back the mandatory requirement and a lot of that pipeline just evaporated.

What we do have is a steady flow of double materiality assessments and annual sustainability reports, which is fine I guess. The exhausting part is the questionnaire season: CDP, ISE B3 (the local sustainability index), the S&P CSA for the Dow Jones Best-in-Class, among others indices, all piling up around the same time. Tons of evidence gathering and back-and-forth with clients for relatively little strategic value IMO.

[u/Lumpy_Lengthiness404 → u/VoiderElf]

ugh questionnaire season is brutal and you know half the data is just being massaged to death before anyone even looks at the evidence. CDP alone makes me want to throw my laptop out a window, the way they keep shifting the scoring methodology without telling anyone until the last minute. we had a client last year who got blindsided by the new forests module and the panic emails were something else

ISE B3 is one i haven't dealt with directly but i've heard the documentation requirements are insane for what you get out of it. feels like these indices are just revenue streams for the rating agencies at this point, not actually driving any real change on the ground. the S&P CSA is marginally better but the time sink is still ridiculous

wild that your CVM pulled back on the ISSB mandate though, we've been betting hard on S1/S2 becoming the global baseline and building out whole service lines around it. must be frustrating to have that pipeline just disappear overnight after everyone spent 2025 prepping for it

[u/UnpopularCrayon]

Holy Acronym, Batman!

[u/IMicrowaveSteak → u/UnpopularCrayon]

Welcome to sustainability and ESG. Here are just a few of the frameworks I work on every single day:

TCFD
ESRS
CDP
SASB
GRI
UN SDG
ISS QualityScore
S&P CSA
EUDR
EPR
SSJB
IFRS
ISO
UK SRS

I could unironically rattle off 15 more

[u/Vegetable-Power-Yeah → u/IMicrowaveSteak]

If we’re doing general ESG acronyms, not just reporting frameworks-

CSR
ESG
LCA
PCF
PPWR
EPR
CMRF
SBTI
TCFD
TNFD

[u/svideo → u/IMicrowaveSteak]

like a lot of these programs, seems to be mostly sustaining billable hours

[u/Budget-Badger7411 → u/UnpopularCrayon]

HAHA yea im a newbie so this was so hard to understand

[u/Pristine-Elevator-11]

I was working as an ESG consultant till last year, didn’t really update myself after switching to industry.

Weren’t a lot of regulations, especially the ESRS rolled back? We had a huge pipeline for tons of reporting work globally and I was involved with the digital transformation part for helping the clients set up their processes for reporting. Our pipeline got significantly reduced by H2 2026.

DMA refreshes were a bit routine for the clients I was working with, so not sure if that has significantly increased per se but the clients stopped putting in money into the reporting/disclosure projects because they still saw them as a cost center.

[u/IMicrowaveSteak → u/Pristine-Elevator-11]

It was paused then it passed in Feb 2026. The ESRS requirements were shrunk and the # of companies reduced but it’s still almost 500-1000 US companies

[u/Geeeniefied]

In my (previous) firm, the focus on CSRD almost evaporated because of the EU rollback. Hoping that more extreme ESG-related right tailed events will shake things up and get things started soon - although my view is that we're almost certainly too late in managing species-endangering climate risks.

[u/AranciataRosso]

I've been in ESG consulting for a while (it was CSR when I started my career), so I'm perhaps approaching our little corner of the consulting world a little differently. Rant ahead!

Our field really got an uptick when CSRD first came about, but sadly our field was soon overran by auditors and accountants checking forms and ticking boxes. That first year of ESRS auditing, fighting with Big4 auditors on misinterpretations of the (already very poorly written) standards makes me somewhat glad we got omnibus. At least now our clients can breathe a little and allocate their resources towards more impactful analyses.

The next hurdle these days is to wait out this new trend of the same, AI fuelled carbon accounting software popping up everywhere. Or rather, it's not that new technology in this field is bad - rather the opposite - but the problem is when you have consultants without adequate backgrounds (again, auditors and accountants to generalise a bit) using "AI" tools to generate rubbish, and passing it along at great premiums whilst diluting any credibility we had left in our (not so little) field.

Pining for the good old days when you couldn't meet your Scope 2 reduction targets by acquiring Guarantees of Origin for some Scandinavian hydro power, or reducing your footprint through mass balanced "green" steel.... aaand when clients didn't want to pay you anything, jobs were hard to come by and sustainability... wasn't that something you should discuss with the SVP of HR? Truly not a material risk to the company.

I'm exaggerating a bit of course - I'm glad there is a lot happening now, and I feel as we're scaling back a bit from the CSRD/reporting trend, we're seeing more meaningful work ahead with clients who appreciate the insights.

Oh, and I'm no better - I'm very much working with "all" the acronyms, be it ESRS, CRD6/EBA GL, SBTi etc, helping clients set up different SaaS or ERP solutions to help them speed up the reporting.

[u/IMicrowaveSteak → u/AranciataRosso]

Ah yeah this sucks. So for me I’m primarily in a company that does audit accounting and financial reporting work. I’m the weirdo who does sustainability stuff.

So when sustainability turned into an audit requirement it was a dream for me instead of a nightmare like most true sustainability consulting firms.

I do think I sense the change back to actual sustainability reporting to be fair.

[u/Geeeniefied]

Since the CSRD rollback the nature of sus projects quickly changed with proof of value being more important than ever before.. its good, but clients have no idea how to properly do this, nor do they want to spend more money on something that is no longer heavily compliance-driven - so in my own view its just back to the basic compliance stuff for the coming seasons

[u/stealthagents]

Navigating the complexities of CSRD and ISSB can indeed be overwhelming, especially with the constant updates and statutory requirements piling up. It sounds like you're anticipating a busy period ahead. At Stealth Agents, we've been supporting businesses with these exact challenges for over a decade. Our full-time executive assistants and dedicated account managers can help manage the intricate details of your sustainability projects, letting you focus on client engagement and strategic decisions.

[u/Fluid-Reason-9084]

anyone having too many projects to manage, forward some to me. Expert in CSRD, EU Taxonomy, Carbon accounting

[u/Beautiful-Air-7797]

it sounds like the shift from assessments to implementation and reporting is creating a whole new workload. The mix of CSRD, ESRS, and ISSB seems especially complex and this is true. which area has been the biggest learning curve for you and pls be honest at this point?

[u/IMicrowaveSteak → u/Beautiful-Air-7797]

It’s def a lot of work. The actual biggest learning curve is how to deliver the regulatory rationale and logic to legal, finance and audit teams (and boards). Balancing the pushback of one department while another department at the same company is pushing me to go faster is frustrating and makes my work impossible to finish on time.

I have clients with thousands of EU employees and massive footprints globally that string me along endlessly. I’ll be kicking off a project and then oneeeeee SVP in some department who is clearly anti-ESG for political reasons comes with some illogical reason why this isn’t applicable to them. Meanwhile, I have to explain to the EVP leading the project why we are gonna be delayed.

It’s the infighting within these organizations and how to navigate their political views against the literal legislation and regulatory requirement that is by far the biggest challenge of my job.

To be clear - I have zero political bias in this. I’m paid to know the legal and regulatory requirement and conduct my work purely based on that and nothing else.

[u/IMicrowaveSteak → u/[deleted]]

It’s kinda what I enjoy. The “seasonality” aspect of consulting doesn’t exist much in sustainability. Like yeah it has waves, but because companies can’t figure out what the hell they want to do, I’m working with laggard and proactive companies at the same time.