ISSB framework — the two standards and four pillars
What it is, who uses it, and why that is not a duty.
What the ISSB framework is
The ISSB framework is the global baseline for reporting sustainability information to investors. It is two standards — IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 — issued by the International Sustainability Standards Board, together with the industry-based material that sits behind them.
The Board was announced on 3 November 2021 at COP26 in Glasgow, and issued its first two standards in June 2023.
The word framework does some work here. The ISSB does not publish a single document called the ISSB Framework; it publishes standards. What the market means by the phrase is the whole architecture: the two standards, the four pillars they are organised around, the SASB industry material they point to, and the jurisdictional machinery that turns any of it into a duty.
The audience is the decisive design choice. The ISSB framework asks what a reasonable investor needs in order to judge an entity’s prospects — not what a wider public might want to know.
The Board sits inside the IFRS Foundation, and the Foundation is careful about how it describes the relationship: the ISSB “operates alongside—but independently from—the IASB”. That independence is why a decision on accounting standards does not bind the sustainability board, and why the bare word “IFRS” is ambiguous between the two.
Where the framework came from
The ISSB framework is not an invention. It is a consolidation, and the Foundation says so in terms: the Board builds on the work of the CDSB, the TCFD, the Value Reporting Foundation’s Integrated Reporting Framework and the industry-based SASB Standards, together with the World Economic Forum’s Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics.
Before 2021 a preparer chose between four or five overlapping voluntary frameworks. After 2023 there is one investor-facing baseline, and the others are either inside it or pointed at a different audience.
The sequence is short enough to recite and that is exactly what makes it dangerous. The ISSB was formed in 2021; IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 were issued in June 2023; and IFRS S2 is effective for annual reporting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2024, with earlier application permitted.
That fourth date belongs to IFRS S2 and to nothing else. It is not the UK’s date, and the phrase “effective date” does not appear in either UK standard.
IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 — the two standards
IFRS S1 carries the general requirements. It governs how an entity identifies, measures and presents information about sustainability-related risks and opportunities that could reasonably be expected to affect its prospects — every topic, climate included. The standard is set out in paragraphs 1–86 and Appendices A–E, and all paragraphs have equal authority.
IFRS S2 carries climate. The Foundation’s own description is the clearest one available: it “integrates and builds on the recommendations of the TCFD and incorporates industry-based disclosure requirements derived from SASB Standards”.
The two are designed to be applied together. IFRS S1 may be applied early only as long as IFRS S2 is also applied — the Board did not want a general standard used to avoid the climate one.
Both standards are readable in full without paying and without registering. The paragraph-numbered HTML of IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 is served openly from the Foundation’s own site; only the Basis for Conclusions sits behind the registration wall on the navigator.
The four pillars of the ISSB framework
Governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets. Every disclosure in the ISSB framework hangs off one of those four, and all four are inherited — they are the TCFD’s four recommendations, set out at Figure 4 of the June 2017 Final Report.
Beneath the four sit eleven recommended disclosures: two under governance, and three under each of the other three. Four and eleven are two nested layers, not two ways of counting the same thing.
The count is worth holding onto because it is so often reported wrongly. The October 2021 update changed the guidance and expressly did not modify the four recommendations or the eleven — there is no post-2021 variant wording to quote.
One asymmetry inside the pillars survives into the ISSB framework and almost every summary flattens it. The qualifier where such information is material appears on strategy and on metrics and targets. It does not appear on governance or on risk management. A page that says “the pillars apply where material” is describing half the framework.
The ISSB framework uses enterprise value, not double materiality
This is the single most consequential thing to get right about the ISSB framework, and the one most often stated backwards. The framework applies financial materiality: information is in scope when it could reasonably be expected to affect the entity’s prospects — its cash flows, its access to finance, its cost of capital.
It is not double materiality. The ISSB framework asks about the world’s effect on the company. The European framework also asks about the company’s effect on the world.
The two boards have said so jointly. In a statement co-signed with GRI, the position is put plainly: “ISSB Standards require the disclosure of information about impacts only in so far as this provides material information for investors with respect to sustainability-related risks and opportunities for the entity”.
GRI occupies the other half. It applies impact materiality, and it attributes the double-materiality label to the European Union rather than claiming it: GRI’s own guide says its standards represent the impact side of double materiality. So the honest sentence is that neither GRI nor the ISSB is a double-materiality standard on its own; the EU regime is the one that asks for both.
So much for what it is.
What the Board absorbed, and what it disbanded
Four bodies went into the ISSB framework, and they went in four different ways. Conflating them is the commonest error in this subject.
The TCFD was disbanded. The FSB’s own announcement of 12 October 2023 is unambiguous: the 2023 status report was the Task Force’s final task, and it would be wound up.
What moved was a duty, not a body of work: responsibility for monitoring the progress of companies’ climate-related disclosures transferred from 2024. The owner sources use both “the ISSB” and “the IFRS Foundation” for the recipient in different documents, so a page that insists on one and forbids the other is over-claiming. What survives on every source is that the Task Force ceased to exist and a monitoring duty changed hands.
The Value Reporting Foundation — which itself held the SASB Standards and the Integrated Reporting Framework — consolidated into the IFRS Foundation in August 2022. The Climate Disclosure Standards Board went the same way. Neither was disbanded in the sense the TCFD was; their material is still published and still maintained.
And in 2026 one more piece moved. The Integrated Reporting and Connectivity Council was wound up on 31 July 2026 — but its mandate was transferred to the IFRS Advisory Council, not terminated, and the Integrated Reporting Framework itself is untouched.
The vocabulary matters because the errors run in both directions. The Integrated Reporting Framework was not withdrawn and was never made a standard; the Council was not abolished. The Foundation’s own paper describes integrated reporting as now “permanently embedded within the Foundation’s core operations”.
SASB Standards, and how binding they are
The SASB Standards are the industry-specific layer. The IFRS Foundation is blunt about ownership: the ISSB is responsible for the SASB Standards, which transferred with the Value Reporting Foundation in August 2022.
There are 77 industries across eleven sectors, classified under SICS — the Sustainable Industry Classification System, which the Board decided in May 2024 to retain.
The version stamp is no longer uniform, and that is a live citation trap. Most of the standards carry the 2023-12 stamp, effective for annual periods beginning on or after 1 January 2025. But in December 2025 the Board issued consequential amendments to three financial-sector standards — asset management and custody, commercial banks, and insurance — stamped 2025-12 and effective for periods beginning on or after 1 January 2027.
How binding the SASB material is depends on which version of the framework you are applying, and this is the sharpest UK divergence there is. Under IFRS S1 an entity “shall refer to and consider the applicability of” the SASB disclosure topics. The UK changed that verb.
In UK SRS S1 the same obligation reads may. So an entity claiming compliance with the ISSB framework is in a different position from one claiming compliance with the UK’s endorsed version of it.
The change is not blanket, and anyone citing it has to name the paragraph. In the published UK standards the softening lands at some paragraphs and not others: Annex A of the government response records what changed, and the duty to disclose which SASB topics were applied, if any, was not softened at all.
ISSB framework vs TCFD — what actually changed
The architecture is the same. The four pillars carried over intact, and a reporter who built a TCFD-aligned disclosure will recognise the shape of an IFRS S2 one immediately. What changed is status, precision and reach.
TCFD was a set of recommendations from a task force. The ISSB framework is a set of standards from a standard-setter, capable of being written into law by a jurisdiction.
Three substantive differences are worth knowing. The first is Scope 3. Under TCFD, Scope 3 emissions were to be disclosed “if appropriate”; under IFRS S2 they are required, across the fifteen categories of the GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain Standard, subject only to whatever transitional relief a jurisdiction grants.
The second is measurement. IFRS S2 fixes the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard as the measurement basis rather than leaving it to the preparer. The third is industry specificity: IFRS S2 brings the SASB industry metrics inside the standard, which TCFD never did.
And one thing did not change at all. After October 2021 the TCFD asked for GHG emissions independent of a materiality assessment — the ISSB framework kept that position.
GRI and the ISSB align on one thing only
“GRI and the ISSB are aligned” is one of those claims that everyone repeats and nobody sources. What actually exists between the two boards is a memorandum of understanding from March 2022, a commitment to identify and align common disclosures, a greenhouse-gas equivalence statement, and a joint framing statement.
One operative mechanism, and it covers greenhouse gas figures only.
The mechanism is worth having. Organisations reporting under both may use the equivalent IFRS S2 disclosures for Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 to meet the corresponding GRI 102 requirements — conditional on measuring under the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard and cross-referencing in the content index. It does not bite until GRI 102 takes effect on 1 January 2027, or on early adoption.
No disclosure-level correspondence table between the ISSB framework and the GRI Standards has been published by either owner as at 10 September 2026. That is a negative finding about what could be located, not a claim that none exists.
The two boards are also explicit that they do not bind each other: they “make decisions separately in accordance with their established standard-setting due processes”.
What IFRS S2 actually asks for
IFRS S2 is where the ISSB framework stops being architecture and starts being work. Under the four pillars it asks for a specific and largely non-negotiable set of things.
Greenhouse gas emissions across all three scopes, measured under the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard, with Scope 3 covering the fifteen value-chain categories.
Climate resilience assessed through scenario analysis — not a single forecast, but the entity’s strategy tested against more than one plausible climate future. Named governance: which body oversees climate, how it judges itself competent, how information reaches it, and whether executive remuneration is linked to climate targets.
Current and anticipated financial effects on financial position, financial performance and cash flows, over the short, medium and long term. Industry-based metrics drawn from the SASB material. And, where the entity has a climate transition plan, disclosure of it — the standard does not require an entity to have one.
That last distinction is where more preparers go wrong than anywhere else. The ISSB framework requires you to disclose a transition plan if you have one. It does not require you to have one.
The Foundation published guidance on transition-plan disclosures in June 2025, drawing on the Transition Plan Taskforce material now hosted on its Knowledge Hub. The guidance is explicit that it “does not add to or otherwise change the requirements in IFRS S2”.
Connectivity with the financial statements
A disclosure built on the ISSB framework is not a sustainability report bolted to the back of the annual report. It is supposed to reconcile with the accounts: same reporting entity, same period, same judgements.
The assumptions in a climate disclosure should be recognisably the same assumptions used in impairment testing, asset useful lives, provisions and going concern. Where they differ, the difference should be explicable.
This is the point at which sustainability reporting stops being a communications exercise. A disclosure describing a material transition risk to a product line, sitting in the same document as an impairment review that assumes that line continues indefinitely, is an inconsistency an auditor will find and a reader will notice.
In the UK the connectivity point has a statutory edge. The endorsed standards are designated so that companies can satisfy the climate-related elements of the non-financial and sustainability information statement under the Companies Act without duplicating them — which makes placement within the annual report a practical question, not a presentational one.
Settled as a standard. Unsettled as a duty.
Who uses the ISSB framework
The Foundation publishes its own count, and it is the only count worth citing. As at 18 August 2026 the Trustees’ five-year plan says more than 45 jurisdictions are using the ISSB Standards. That figure is a floor, not a point estimate, and it has climbed through 36 in June 2025 and 39 in October 2025 to get there.
But “taking steps towards” is not “in effect”, and the second number is the one a reader actually wants: requirements in 19 jurisdictions had already come into effect as at 24 February 2026.
The Foundation’s directory splits jurisdictions two ways, and the distinction is load-bearing. A profile is published only once a jurisdiction’s approach is finalised and no longer subject to consultation. A snapshot is a preview based on a preliminary understanding of proposals, and may differ from the final requirements. Re-counted on 10 September 2026, the directory carries 22 profiles and 14 snapshots.
Aggregating the two into a single “adopted” count is how an honest figure becomes an overstatement. The United Kingdom sits among the snapshots, which is the correct status for a jurisdiction whose approach is not finalised.
On coverage, the Foundation’s own prose gives the triple: jurisdictions accounting for nearly 55% of global GDP, more than 40% of global market capitalisation and more than half of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The market-capitalisation share lags the GDP share badly, and the reason is one absence: the United States has not adopted. The Foundation says as much itself, putting the figure at around 75% of global market capitalisation once the US is excluded.
Adopting the ISSB framework is not mandating it
Three facts travel under one sentence and they stopped moving together in 2026: whether a jurisdiction has adopted the standard, whether anyone is required to use it, and which regulator does the requiring.
The standard has won. The mandate has not settled.
Brazil is the proof, because it diverged from itself inside a month. On 29 May 2026 the securities regulator removed the obligation it had imposed on public companies, replacing it with a comply-or-explain notice duty from 1 January 2027. A company that opts in must still apply the standards in full, with reasonable assurance — so “Brazil abandoned ISSB reporting” is wrong in the other direction.
South Korea moved the opposite way. On 8 July 2026 the Financial Services Commission cut its threshold from ₩30 trillion to ₩10 trillion for 2028 reporting, with ₩5 trillion following in 2029. That is a policy decision, not a statute: the enabling amendment was not confirmed as introduced or passed.
The United States is the most misreported item of all. The 2024 climate rules were proposed for rescission on 29 May 2026 — proposed, not repealed. There has been no ruling on the merits, and the rules remain on the books, stayed and never effective.
Canada paused its work on a mandatory climate rule — and the date is 23 April 2025, not 2026, which several 2026 commentaries get wrong. Paused is not abandoned; the Canadian standards remain available for voluntary use.
The United Kingdom is its own category: standards issued, in force as a voluntary option, and no regulator has yet made a rule requiring anyone to apply them.
How the UK applies the ISSB framework
The UK endorsed the framework rather than adopting it wholesale. UK SRS S1 and UK SRS S2 were published on 25 February 2026 as the UK versions of IFRS S1 and IFRS S2, with a short list of amendments recorded in Annex A of the government response.
They were issued for voluntary use. As at 10 September 2026 no UK entity is legally required to apply them.
The mandate, if it comes, comes from the Financial Conduct Authority rather than from the standards. CP26/5 proposes application to in-scope listed companies for accounting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2027, subject to a Policy Statement that had not been published when this page was last checked.
That is why the Foundation lists the United Kingdom as a snapshot rather than a profile: the approach is not finalised, and a snapshot is explicitly a preview of proposals.
The distance between “the UK has adopted the ISSB framework” and “UK companies must report under it” is the whole of this page’s argument, in one country.
New ISSB standards do not apply automatically in the UK
This is a small point with large consequences, and the FRC states it plainly. Any new or amended standard the ISSB issues in future — on nature, on human capital, on anything else — would not automatically apply in the UK. It would first have to go through the UK’s formal endorsement process before being incorporated into UK Sustainability Reporting Standards.
So the UK version of the ISSB framework can lag the global one, deliberately, and by design.
The machinery is a two-committee process set out in the Framework and Terms of Reference published by DBT: a Technical Advisory Committee for the technical assessment and a Policy and Implementation Committee for the policy one. The split explains why some of the UK amendments are technical and others are frankly political.
It also means a UK reporter has to be careful about which document they are reading. A paragraph number cited without its standard is now ambiguous, because IFRS S1 ¶55(a) and UK SRS S1 ¶55(a) do not say the same thing.
What is changing, and what is not yet in force
Writing about the ISSB framework as a settled 2023 artefact is the most reliable way to be out of date. Three things are moving, and none of them is finished.
In December 2025 the Board issued Amendments to Greenhouse Gas Emissions Disclosures, aimed at reducing complexity and duplicative reporting. They are published and not yet in force: effective for reporting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2027, early application permitted.
The digital taxonomy is following them. Proposed Update 1 was published on 29 July 2026 with comments closing on 28 September 2026. It is a tagging vocabulary for information the standards already require, and the Foundation says so directly: it “neither introduces new requirements nor affects a company’s compliance with ISSB Standards”.
And the SASB material is being rewritten underneath the framework. An exposure draft covering agricultural products, meat, poultry and dairy, and electric utilities and power generators closed on 24 July 2026, following a larger July 2025 draft. The proposed effective date is between twelve and eighteen months after issuance — so what exists today is not what applies today.
None of it reaches a UK reporter without endorsement first. Published, in force, and applicable in the UK are three different states, and the ISSB framework currently has something sitting in each.
That is the world. This is the work.
How to apply the ISSB framework
The order of work is not the order of the standard. Reporters who start at governance and write down the page tend to discover, late, that the data underneath will not support what they have said.
Start with the two things that take longest: the greenhouse gas inventory, and the identification of which risks and opportunities could reasonably be expected to affect prospects.
The inventory is a measurement exercise with an audit trail. Scope 1 and Scope 2 are usually tractable; Scope 3 is a value-chain mapping problem, and the fifteen categories are not equally relevant to any business. Doing that badly is the most common reason a first disclosure cannot be assured.
The materiality identification is a judgement exercise, and the ISSB framework wants the judgement documented rather than the conclusion asserted. Under IFRS S1 an entity is directed to the SASB material to help it decide what its industry typically finds material — the point of the industry layer is that it stops the assessment being invented from scratch.
Only then is governance worth writing, because by that point you know what the body is being asked to oversee.
Scenario analysis, financial effects and the transition plan disclosure come last, and each depends on the two foundational pieces being real.
Six ways the ISSB framework is described wrongly
Each of these is in wide circulation, and each is contradicted by an owner source.
“The ISSB absorbed the TCFD.” No body merged into another. The Task Force was disbanded; a monitoring duty changed hands.
“The ISSB framework uses double materiality.” It does not, and the ISSB and GRI have said jointly that impacts are in scope only so far as they are material to investors.
“GRI and the ISSB are interoperable.” One mechanism exists, it covers greenhouse gas figures, and it does not take effect until 1 January 2027.
“Forty jurisdictions require ISSB reporting.” The 40-plus count is jurisdictions taking steps towards the standards. The in-effect count was 19.
“The SEC repealed its climate rules.” Rescission was proposed; it needs a further vote, and no court has ruled on the merits.
“IFRS S2 is effective from 1 January 2024, so UK reporting starts then.” That date belongs to IFRS S2. The effective date was removed from the UK standards entirely.
Where interoperability stops
Interoperability is the word every standard-setter uses and almost nobody defines. It is worth being precise about what it can and cannot mean.
At its strongest it means one set of figures satisfies two requirements. That is what the GRI greenhouse-gas equivalence does, and it is the only mechanism of that strength located between the ISSB framework and any other framework.
At its weakest it means two standard-setters have said they will talk to each other. Memoranda of understanding, joint framing statements and commitments to align common disclosures are real, and they are not the same thing as a preparer being able to file once.
Everything between those poles is a mapping table, and mapping tables go stale. The published GRI–ESRS interoperability index is dated November 2024 and maps against the 2023 European standards, which have since been replaced — the table has not been reissued.
The practical test is simple. Ask whether the claimed interoperability changes a single line of what you file. If it does not, it is a relationship, not a mechanism.
What is left is the record.
The standards question is settled and the mandate question is not. Nineteen jurisdictions require this; more than forty-five are talking about it; and the work the ISSB framework asks for — a defensible inventory and a documented materiality judgement — is the same either way.
The bottom line · Photo: Unsplash / name_gravityISSB framework — key facts
Every figure on this page in one place, each with the date it was published.
A number without its date is not a fact about the ISSB framework — it is a fact about some month in its history.
ISSB framework — frequently asked questions
The ISSB framework is the set of global sustainability disclosure standards issued by the International Sustainability Standards Board: IFRS S1, which carries the general requirements, and IFRS S2, which carries climate.
It also takes in the four reporting pillars inherited from the TCFD and the SASB industry standards the ISSB now owns. The Board was announced on 3 November 2021 at COP26 and issued its first two standards in June 2023.
Its audience is investors, and its materiality test is financial.
Governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets. They are the TCFD’s four recommendations, carried into IFRS S2 unchanged.
Beneath the four sit eleven recommended disclosures — two under governance and three under each of the others. The October 2021 TCFD update changed the guidance and expressly left the four and the eleven alone.
Not by itself. The ISSB is a standard-setter, not a regulator: its standards become obligations only when a jurisdiction writes them into law or rules.
The IFRS Foundation recorded requirements in effect in 19 jurisdictions as at 24 February 2026, against more than 45 jurisdictions taking steps towards the standards.
In the United Kingdom the endorsed versions were published on 25 February 2026 for voluntary use, and no UK entity is legally required to apply them as at 10 September 2026.
The architecture is the same and the status is not. TCFD was a set of recommendations from a task force; the ISSB framework is a set of standards from a standard-setter, capable of being written into law.
Three requirements hardened. Scope 3 emissions moved from “if appropriate” to required across the fifteen value-chain categories; the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard was fixed as the measurement basis; and the SASB industry metrics were brought inside the standard.
The TCFD itself was disbanded on 12 October 2023.
No. It applies financial materiality: information is in scope where it could reasonably be expected to affect the entity’s prospects.
The ISSB and GRI have put it jointly — ISSB Standards require disclosure about impacts only so far as that provides material information for investors about the entity’s sustainability-related risks and opportunities. Double materiality is the European formulation, and GRI describes its own standards as representing the impact side of it.
The ISSB owns them. The SASB Standards transferred with the Value Reporting Foundation in August 2022 and cover 77 industries across eleven sectors under the SICS classification.
Under IFRS S1 an entity shall refer to and consider the applicability of the SASB disclosure topics. The UK deliberately softened that verb to “may” in its endorsed standards at several paragraphs — so the obligation differs depending on which version you are applying.
Two numbers are published and they answer different questions. More than 45 jurisdictions were using or taking steps towards the ISSB Standards according to the IFRS Foundation Trustees’ five-year plan of 18 August 2026.
Requirements had actually come into effect in 19 jurisdictions as at 24 February 2026.
The Foundation’s directory separately carries 22 jurisdictional profiles and 14 snapshots. A profile is published only once an approach is finalised; a snapshot is a preview of proposals, and the United Kingdom is a snapshot.
Largely, yes. IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 are the standards the ISSB has issued, and when people say “the ISSB framework” those two documents are what they mean.
The phrase usually reaches a little wider, to the four pillars the standards are organised around and the SASB industry material they point at. The ISSB does not publish anything called “the ISSB Framework”; it publishes standards.
The UK endorsed IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 with a short list of amendments, recorded in Annex A of the government response.
Two differences matter most. The effective date was removed from the UK standards entirely, so 1 January 2024 does not travel across. And the obligation to refer to the SASB material was softened from “shall” to “may” at several paragraphs.
New or amended ISSB standards do not apply in the UK automatically; each must go through the UK endorsement process first.
Three projects are in flight. Amendments to Greenhouse Gas Emissions Disclosures were issued in December 2025 and are effective for reporting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2027 — published, but not yet in force.
The ISSB Taxonomy Update 1 was published on 29 July 2026 with comments closing on 28 September 2026; the Foundation says it neither introduces new requirements nor affects compliance. And the SASB Standards are being enhanced through a series of exposure drafts.
None of it reaches a UK reporter without endorsement.
Primary sources
Every figure and legal statement on this page carries a citation.
These are the primary documents behind them, re-verified on 10 September 2026.
The standards
The Board and its lineage
The TCFD, at source
Adoption, and the mandate question
The UK
Interoperability, measurement and what is in flight
Go deeper on the ISSB framework
IFRS S1 — General Requirements
The general standard: every sustainability topic, and how the report is shaped.
The standardIFRS S2 — Climate-related Disclosures
The climate standard the UK endorsed, requirement by requirement.
The UK pairThe UK’s endorsed standards
What the UK endorsed, and what it changed on the way through.
MigrationTCFD to UK SRS
Requirement-by-requirement mapping from TCFD-aligned reporting.
PillarsClimate-related Financial Disclosures
The four pillars, and the eleven disclosures beneath them.
GlobalGlobal Sustainability Standards
The wider landscape the ISSB framework sits inside.
MaterialityDouble Materiality
Why the ISSB framework is not a double-materiality standard.
ComparisonUK SRS vs ESRS
Where the UK and European regimes actually diverge.
LandscapeESG Frameworks in the UK
Which framework answers which question, and for whom.