On February 26, 2026, the EU published Directive 2026/470 in its official journal and the corporate sustainability world split, instantly into two camps. On one side: relief. On the other: alarm. And in the middle, a much harder question that neither camp is fully answering; what does it actually mean to hold companies accountable for their environmental impact and has Europe just made that harder or easier to do?

To understand why that question matters, we have to go back to what CSRD was originally trying to do and why it was so radical in the first place.

What CSRD actually was? The idea behind it and why execution was always going to be hard

Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive was adopted in November 2022 with a premise that sounds obvious but was in practice, revolutionary: treat sustainability reporting the same way the world treats financial reporting. Audited. Standardized. Publicly accessible. Legally required and not a voluntary appendix to an annual report and of course not a glossy sustainability brochure, but a document with the same legal weight as a set of accounts: one that an auditor would scrutinize and regulator could act on.